FORMER mayor of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman, has launched his campaign for re-election after being banned from office.
- Rahman served as mayor of Tower Hamlets from 2010 to 2015, but was found to be “personally responsible” for electoral fraud while in office and banned from standing in elections for five years.
- He will stand as the mayoral candidate for the Aspire Party, founded after his old party, Tower Hamlets First, was dissolved when he was removed from office in 2015.
- Rahman was voted in as the first directly-elected mayor of Tower Hamlets in 2010 as an independent candidate, but later founded the Tower Hamlets First Party, with which he was re-elected in 2014.
Lutfur Rahman
The 2014 election took five days to complete and was later declared void by an election court. The court found in 2015 that Rahman was guilty of corrupt and illegal practices.
The court said Rahman had led a “ruthless and dishonest” campaign to smear Labour mayoral candidate John Biggs – the current mayor of Tower Hamlets – as racist.
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Four Tower Hamlets voters brought the case against the then-mayor, with their lawyers accusing him of ‘personation’ in postal votes and at ballot stations, and of ballot paper tampering.
Judge Richard Mawrey said Rahman had: “Driven a horse and coaches through electoral law and didn’t care.”
The ruling removed Rahman from office, banned him from standing again for five years and forced him to pay a £250,000 fine. However, he was not prosecuted further.
Rahman will stand in the Tower Hamlets mayoral election on May 5 for the Aspire party. Although the council is almost entirely Labour-controlled, Aspire won a seat on the council in a by-election in August.
Biggs and at least two other candidates will also stand in the contest. Rahman’s office was contacted for comment.
(Local Democracy Reporting Service)
Apsana Begum