The Minister is no fan of The Disgraced Former Europe Minister Keith Vaz. And it seems that the same old Vaz-related shit is in the process of hitting the fan once again.
Keith Vaz was under intense pressure last night after a fellow MP said he had been misled over Vaz’s links to a controversial lawyer.
Vaz, a government minister under Tony Blair and chairman of the Commons home affairs committee, persuaded Virendra Sharma, the Labour MP for Ealing Southall, to intervene with him in a court case involving Shahrokh Mireskandari, an Iranian-born lawyer.
In a letter to the court, Vaz asked that a High Court judge review the case in which Mireskandari, senior partner with Dean and Dean solicitors, was on the brink of losing a long-running legal battle that could cost him £250,000.
Sharma said yesterday that when Vaz had asked him to sign the letter jointly, he had failed to tell him of previous personal dealings with Mireskandari. “Keith’s office drafted the letter. I looked at it and signed it. I did not know this company [Dean and Dean] and I had no knowledge that Keith Vaz knew this company,” Sharma said.
“If Keith Vaz knew the people involved he should have told me. If I had known all that, my approach would have been different. I probably wouldn’t have written the letter, or written it in that way.”
[...]The MPs’ letter to the High Court earlier this year concerned a dispute between Dean and Dean and a Romanian company called Angel Airlines. It is said to have highlighted complaints that Mireskandari had made about the conduct of a previous judge in the case.
The judge in the appeal, Mr Justice Coulson, is said to have become aware of it shortly before he was to decide Mireskandari’s appeal against an order seeking £250,000 costs from him. A source close to the judge was quoted yesterday as saying: “He was very surprised to get a letter asking for an adjournment from someone [Vaz] who was not party to the case. The judge had never come across something like this before in his long career.”
[...]Fellow MPs on the home affairs committee said they had been trying to contact Vaz yesterday about separate allegations over his relationship with Mireskandari. They have raised concerns about the presence of Mireskandari during a fact-finding trip by the committee to Moscow last May.
It was reported yesterday that Mireskandari had entertained Vaz and his wife, the immigration lawyer Maria Fernandes, at various events including in private boxes at concerts at the O2 arena, the London Coliseum and Wembley stadium.
[...]Vaz was unavailable for comment.
Who could possibly have predicted that the appointment of The Disgraced Former Europe Minister Keith Vaz to the chairmanship of a Commons Select Committee might not have been an entirely sensible move…?
The failure of people to learn from previous mistakes forms part of Simon Jenkins’ column today in The Sunday Times, in which he makes some good points:
It is by no means clear what really happened over the past two weeks or who was to blame.
[...]Were this a military catastrophe or an intelligence failure or even a train crash, there would be a public inquiry. There would be one even if everyone knew what had happened and whom to blame. Neither is the case today. The crash of 2008 has been, for most people, an utter confusion leaving a nasty sense that those in power knew what was going on and were too spineless to control it.
I hate public inquiries, so often media kangaroo courts that merely enrich lawyers. But there cannot have been a fiasco more in need of illumination than the past two weeks in the City of London. Its decisions cry out for analysis; its lessons cry out for learning, and those in charge should render a public account.
And finally… now for something completely different: vote Palin for President.