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The conduct of Lord Ahmed Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction

1.On 23 July 2020 the Conduct Committee, having received new material from Lord Ahmed as part of his appeal against the findings and recommended sanction in my earlier investigation into his conduct, made the following decision:

“In the light of the new evidence put before the Conduct Committee from Mr [D] and [L], and having considered Lord Ahmed’s representations (including his representation that this should cause the Commissioner to rethink her conclusions) as well as the complainant’s contrary representations, the Conduct Committee has reached the conclusion that the matter must be remitted to the Commissioner for her to reconsider any aspects of her findings and recommendations in the light of her investigation and evaluation of the fresh evidence and for her to make thereafter a new or revised report as she may think fit.”

2.This was sent to me on 24 July. I was also provided with extracts from Lord Ahmed’s appeal and Ms Zaman’s response to it (these extracts are included in Appendix 1).

3.The Committee’s decision offered the choice of amending my existing report or providing a supplementary report. I chose the latter to emphasise the two stage nature of my task: first to investigate and evaluate the new material, and then in the light of my evaluation of the new evidence to reconsider the findings and recommendation in the report of my first investigation.

4.This report is, therefore, supplementary to my first report into the conduct of Lord Ahmed.

Matters for consideration

5.The evidence I was asked to investigate consisted of new information provided to Lord Ahmed by D, described as a journalist whom he knew professionally but not personally. Lord Ahmed had asked him to provide a character reference as part of the process of providing me with material to take into account when considering the sanction I proposed to the Committee.

6.Following this request, D told Lord Ahmed that he had some information that was relevant to his case. Lord Ahmed therefore asked him to contact his solicitors, Imran Khan & Partners.

7.D informed them that in the first half of 2018, probably April, Ms Zaman had told him in a telephone call that she had lied in her allegations against Lord Ahmed.

8.D explained that in 2018 he had been approached by another journalist—W, Associate Editor, Asian Lite—to help with a story W was working on based on Ms Zaman’s allegations against Lord Ahmed.

9.During the course of his interview with the solicitors, D mentioned that he had told another journalist colleague, L, about W’s story. In his written statement, he said that he and L then made enquiries in the local community in Rochdale. He was told that that Ms Zaman was well known to be an habitual liar, particularly in making allegations against men, and that D should not trust what she said in relation to Lord Ahmed. L told him that he had been told that Ms Zaman had made similar allegations of sexual impropriety against other men, including a man called J, which had turned out to be false. L proposed that D speak again to Ms Zaman and, having created a friendly atmosphere, persuade her to tell him the truth.

10.“Luckily enough”, as D put it, Ms Zaman then called him on the phone and, volunteered that she had fabricated her allegations which she described in some detail together with her motivation, and said she intended to create a #MeTooMyLord campaign to increase the impact of her allegations.

11.L also gave a statement to Imran Khan & Partners. In his statement he also explained that he knew Lord Ahmed only professionally, not personally. He said that his sources had told him that Ms Zaman was estranged from her family and had made similar false allegations of sexual assault against a man called J and some others.

12.In her written response to this part of Lord Ahmed’s appeal, Ms Zaman agreed that she had spoken to W and, through him, to D. However, she rejected the account of her having telephoned D and telling him she had fabricated her allegations. She provided reasons why such an action was implausible.

13.She also said that she had not been estranged from her family in 2018, and that in February 2019 D had had a meeting with her father with a view to persuading him to convince his daughter, Ms Zaman, not to go ahead with a Newsnight investigation into allegations made by her and others about Lord Ahmed. She said that this undermined the claims of Lord Ahmed and D that they did not have a personal relationship. She also said she had had nothing to do with a #MeTooMyLord campaign.

14.At a late stage in this investigation a further witness emerged supporting D’s account of the phone call with Ms Zaman. D told us by email on 26 August that his secretary, P, had become aware of this investigation when he asked her to read to him the transcript of his interview with us. She then reminded D that she had been in his car when Ms Zaman phoned. As D had put the call on speaker phone in the car, P had heard her volunteer that she had lied.

15.Although my remit from the Conduct Committee posed a straightforward broad question—whether the new evidence would lead me to reconsider the findings of my first report—the details of D’s and L’s accounts, and subsequently that of P, together with Ms Zaman’s challenges and claims about the meeting between D and her father, raised a number of discrete issues on which I would need to evaluate the evidence:

16.The telephone call from Ms Zaman to D was said to have probably been made in April 2018.27 This was after Ms Zaman had first made a complaint to my office, which I had dismissed as Lord Ahmed’s alleged behaviour was not covered by the House of Lords Code of Conduct then in force.

17.I did not become involved in Ms Zaman’s complaint again until 2019, when the Code of Conduct was altered and the behaviour she had complained of came within my remit to investigate.

18.However, between these two times I was aware that she had:

19.As this new investigation was into allegations, made first by D and subsequently by P, that Ms Zaman had said she had lied about Lord Ahmed’s behaviour, I considered it was important to speak not only to those providing the evidence that Ms Zaman had said she had lied, but also to the various individuals who had engaged with Ms Zaman and her complaint in 2018 and 2019, before I started my investigation in June2019, so as to get their views on Ms Zaman’s reliability as a witness. I also needed to talk to members of Ms Zaman’s family to get their views on the likelihood of people in Rochdale providing the information described in D’s and L’s accounts.

Process

20.I was assisted throughout by Sam Evans (CMP Solutions) and James Whittle, Donna Davidson and Moriyo Aiyeola (the clerks who assist me in my work). I wish to place on record my thanks to them for all their help, while also acknowledging that I am solely responsible for the conclusions reached and the decisions made in this investigation.

21.Ms Evans and one of the clerks was present at each interview, except for one where I conducted the interview alone, with the assistance only of Ms Aiyeola.

22.The interviews were all by audio video link, except that R joined her interview by phone.

23.All interviews took place in August, except that with P, which was on 1 September.

24.Our interview with L was conducted in English and Urdu through a translator. For clarity, his words at interview are given in English, he having been supplied with transcripts of his interview in English and Urdu to check for accuracy.

25.We produced a draft factual report, which was provided to Lord Ahmed and Ms Zaman on 7 September, and I required any response to be received by close of business on 18 September. The final version of the factual report is included as Appendix 2 to this report.

26.Lord Ahmed’s response to the draft factual report, received on 18 September, included comments on the factual basis of the evidence gathered but also included criticisms of process and allegations of bias on my part as well as others. I have sought to reflect in this report the points raised about the evidence gathered. Given the limited remit of this supplementary investigation as part of an appeal process, other points raised seemed more properly addressed to the Conduct Committee. A full copy of Lord Ahmed’s response has therefore been provided to the Committee.

Chronology of events and alleged events described in the evidence

27.This is a chronology of events and alleged events described in the evidence provided or gathered for this report. Where the event is not disputed by another witness, or there is documentary evidence in support, no qualifier is given. Where the factual information is disputed, I indicate this.

28.At some points dates and the precise sequence are unclear from the evidence. Generally, this lack of clarity does not seem significant and can be attributed to the passage of time and lack of corroborative evidence which could pin down dates. Where there may be some significance, I refer to it in the report.

27 At interview D said he thought the call was at the end of April.



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