The Millennium Dome Bombing Saga

 

MD News
2007Thursday, 2007/03/08
Scam upon Scam at the Dome
The Millennium Dome
The Dome In Winter – credit: Allpix Inc.
Somebody was making money out in the Millennium Dome. Unfortunately, it wasn't the taxpayer, it was the people operating the turnstiles, who were wheeling cash away in supermarket trolleys! The scam only came to light when a sweeper-vehicle side-swiped a laden trolley and launched a blizzard of £20 and £10 notes across one of the dome's staff car parks.
   The scam was aided by the government's refusal to install CCTV cameras covering the ticket booths on cost grounds. This allowed the ticket operators to record reduced rate tickets as more expensive tickets and pocket the difference. The best guess of how much this 'saving' has cost the taxpayer is £300,000.

Hathersedge: "Clean Hands"
   The investigation into the running of the Dome has also found that Ms Robyn Carnell-Wyatt, the sacked chief executive of A New Millennium Dawn, the Dome's management quango, was also throwing cash around like a lottery winner on speed. Lord Hathersage, the 'clean hands auditor' appointed to account to Parliament for where the money went, has uncovered a whole series of horror stories about the Dome's finances.
   Among the most alarming is the way contractors, who had let their accounts get into a mess, were receiving monthly cheques for up to £125,000 from Ms Carnell-Wyatt's office to keep their businesses afloat while they sorted out their errant invoices.
   Most of the recipients of Ms Carnell-Wyatt's largesse never did get their books straight and Lord Hathersedge still has no satisfatory explanation for where millions of pounds went. He has acknowledged that his biggest roadblock is the fact that many of the companies set up to service the Millennium Dome went into liquidation when the cash stopped flowing. Which is pretty much an epitaph for everything touched by the McBlair administration.

filed by Smight Aufrank [s.aufrank@md.news.uk]
 

 

MDB News
In 2006 Wednesday, 2007/09/06
"MDB will never be prosecuted"

Julian Hartley Wurthit, formerly a leading light at the Crown Prosecution Service, has expressed severe doubts over whether the Millennium Dome Bomber will be hauled into court if he/she is ever caught. In his recently published volume of memoirs, A Life in the Firing Line (£18.99, Farrago & Farrago), he cited practicality as the source of the MDB's immunity.
   The British public has little appetite for convicting protesters after ten years of New Labour, he writes. He illustrates his case with memories of CPS frustration after juries failed to convict protesters who had damaged British Aerospace aircraft, Trident submarine computer equipment and GM crops.
   Given the depth of bad feeling against the excesses of the McBlair government, he adds, it is difficult to believe that twelve people could be found who would say that the Millennium Dome Bomber did anything wrong in frustrating the government's plan to celebrate the arrival of the Third Millennium one year too soon.
   "This is a ludicrous conclusion," a spokesman for the CPS told your reporter in a telephone interview. "The law says it is illegal to plant bombs in public places and it is ridiculous to argue that causing criminal damage is a legitimate form of protest."
   But somehow, despite all the huffing and puffing, your reporter doubts whether the CPS will ever get the chance to test Mr. Wurthit's theory. Or whether the police are making too much of an effort to find the MDB any more.

filed by Insider [In-17@mdb.news.uk]
 

 

MD News
2007Saturday, 2007/12/08
MDB did Angus McBlair a favour!

The Millennium DomeThe Millennium Dome ran out of money long before it opened, documents released by the National Archives have shown. The latest releases confirm that the Dome would have reached a zero balance in its operating account on January 3rd, 2000, just a few days after its planned opening.
   The Millennium Dome Bomber did the government a favour, therefore, by allowing the Dome's management quango and the then prime minister to twist the collective arms of the administrators of Lottery funds. This unholy alliance was able to raise further operating cash by padding the repair bills shamelessly.
   Mikaela Shannon, a senior accountant with the New Millennium Commission at the time, recalled that: "The Dome was always dancing on the edge of doom. The sensible option would have been to let it slide into insolvency but good sense rarely had much to do with the Dome's affairs.
   "We would spend hours in a meeting, pretending to evaluate lists of unrealistic options. Then we would just give the Dome a few more millions, or tens of millions, just before everyone lost the will to live."
   She added, "At one point, our chief executive almost got up the nerve to recommend that the Dome be closed down early. But he got the usual hints about the adverse effect on his career and he stepped back into line."
   The delay in opening the Dome also let Angus McBlair and his fellow enthusiasts think again about their forecast of a million visitors per month being eager to view the Dome's 'bland' and 'vacuous' content. Even so, the record shows that their estimates of visitor numbers remained wildly over-optimistic until the running of the Dome was taken out of the government's hands.
   The Millennium Dome is believed to have cost the nation in the region of £2 billion during its ill-starred life compared to the McBlair government's planning estimate of £400 million. Lord Hathersedge and his team of auditors are still toiling away to account for where the money went. He has issued two interim reports but his final report is still a long way down the road.

filed by Smight Aufrank [s.aufrank@md.news.uk]
 

 

MD News
2007Friday, 2007/12/28
Time to ring down the curtain
The Millennium Dome
The Dome : Repaired after the 1999 bombing
After eight years full of incident and skulduggery, our publisher has decided to call time on this particular venture. Thus, your humble correspondent has been called back for one last shot at the Dome, the McBlair regime and all the rest.
   Regular readers will have noticed a certain amount of repetion creeping in to the events lining the still-surging wake of the defunct "Dome for the Millennium".
   The nation's politicians continue to behave badly and lie about their part in the project, and those thrown off the gravy train think their time in exile should be over. Their friends, who ran off with shedloads of taxpayers' cash, are still thriving.
   Most of the criminals who planned the extraordinary diamond heist in 2000, are still in gaol but, given the softness on crime of the present government, they can expect to be released soon so that they can start cashing in, too.
2001/02/19 : The fire
   Lord Hathersage, the 'clean hands auditor', is still earning a good living while looking for the 'missing millions', which went astray during the worst excesses of the McBlair years. And the poor old taxpayer is still hoping to make something out of the whole fiasco.
   Not going to happen, folks!
   As an example, let us take the profits expected from developing the land around the Dome site. We were told that building around 5,000 homes on the 190 acres will yield £250 million for the Treasury. But the foot-draggers are at it again.

   Same Old Same Old

Angus McBlair
Angus McBlair: Ousted
Bureaucratic delays and falling land prices have cut £80 million off the forecast and the situation can only get worse. And that 'worse' includes landing the taxpayer with an even higher share of the cost of decontaminating former industrial sites to make them fit for residential purposes.
   And as for getting the houses built by 2016, that's just another of Angus McBlair's unrealistic promises and a further reason for him to remain in exile in Italy.

   Look back and wonder

Give us our year back, you bastard!
The 99-year century
There are people still agitating to have the year stolen by McBlair & Co. added back to the 20th century, which didn't end until December 31st, 2000, despite the world-wide propaganda from ignorant politicians and their stooges. There are police officers around who still think they have a reasonable shot at identifying the Millennium Dome Bomber and putting him in gaol. There are still people around who believe in UFOs and the Loch Ness Monster.
   Perhaps, one day, people will look back on the turn of the Third Millennium and wonder just how crazy people can be. Or perhaps they will look back and realize how little things have changed.

filed by Jarvic Klute [j.klute@md.news.uk]
 

 

MD News
2007Monday, 2007/12/31
Hold that curtain for just
one cotton-pickin' moment!
The new McBlair?
Is this the new face
of the Dome Maniac?
Our publisher said he was calling time on this saga after "eight years full of incident and skulduggery". But a compelling story often refuses to surrender meekly to an arbitrary deadline. Such is the case with this one.
   MD News has just received this image via an email account, which seems to have been established for the purpose as the details used to set it up are clearly false. But the information accompanying the image will be of great interest to our readers.
   Our anonymous correspondent believes that the disgraced former British prime minister, Angus McBlair, has had plastic surgery in Argentina as a means of drawing a line under his former life.
   Reinvented as Antonio Cameroni, he is now said to be running a gay bar in a small town on Italy's northern coast near Piza. The big giveaway, apparently, is the scattering of Millennium Dome memorabilia included in the main room's decorations. Not to mention the fact that the bar is receiving a "Discretionary Regional Diversity Grant" from the European Commission.
   I'd love to go and check this information out, but the editor won't pay my air fare because he's declared this story officially extinct.
   Pity!

filed by Smight Aufrank [s.aufrank@md.news.uk]
 

In 2007
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