Was one Lord gambling with the truth?
Published on 3 February 2009
It seems recent scandals related to the House of Lords have not disappeared.
Now newspaper reports suggest that a peer in the house did not clarify his connections with a proposed casino development for the seaside town of Blackpool.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester has for some time been a staunch supporter of the proposed super casino in Blackpool which would have been built by multimillionaire Trevor Hemmings.
However, when championing the cause of the development it is alleged that he failed to clarify his links with a connected business, Sportech, to which he was a paid adviser.
Sportech is a business in which Mr. Hemmings has a majority stake and is judged by many to be an integral part of his investment portfolio.
Despite the promotion by Lord Faulkner of the Blackpool development the government decided to go for Manchester as the location for the next super casino which caused a serious backlash in the House of Lords, where Lord Faulkner, amongst others, voted against the motion.
In recent years Faulkner tabled several questions about gambling and spoke out in debates on the subject. In January 2007 he failed to declare his links with Sportech when asking whether the Government intended to make representations to Gibraltar about online gambling regulations there.
Lord Faulkner accepted that he had not declared his links to Sportech on the occasions when he spoke up for the Blackpool casino, but said that his work for the company had no connection with the bid. He said that he had never met Mr Hemmings and that he intervened on Blackpool’s behalf because he was impressed by the local council’s case.
“I had never had any meetings with Mr Hemmings. My support for Blackpool arose out of the work that I did on the joint scrutiny committee on the gambling bill,” he said. “When we took evidence from a number of local authorities, Blackpool made their case very strongly. I never at any point got any representations from Mr Hemmings.”
He added: “On the very few occasions when I have spoken on matters which affect Sportech I have always declared the link.”
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