LDA: accounting problems are 'historic'
Chief executive of agency says that problems are being sorted out
The chief executive of the London Development Agency has said that the
accounting problems at the agency are historic and that it is putting new
measures in place to prevent further issues.
Manny Lewis said in an
interview
in the FT today: ‘Those processes and procedures were less strong
historically, but they have been improved dramatically with the new ways of
working we implemented from 2006 onwards.
‘The agency is now unrecognizable to the one that existed when most of the
projects that they are criticizing now were [started].’
The agency has been accused of being the London mayor Ken Livingstone’s piggy
bank, while Deloitte has delivered a damning verdict on the controls in place to
monitor the success of certain projects.
New measures for checking the delivery of projects are set to be put in
place, Lewis says in the interview, and were put to the board yesterday.
Livingstone himself launched an attack on Deloitte’s
report on Tuesday, saying that ‘accountants aren’t the best people to make a
value judgment about what is good art.’
Further Reading:
Livingstone: ‘Accountants can’t judge art’
FT
story: Tougher reviews for London grants unveiled