Conve
In the current round of aldermanic ‘elections’, two of the three candidates seeking re-election are doing so unopposed – Gregory Jones in Farringdon Without and Alastair King in Queenhithe (where the incumbent common councillors were also ”re-elected’ uncontested in March) – but not Langley, who is facing off against Aldgate common councillor Shailendra Umradia and newcomer Elizabeth Anne Lange.
The trick of holding three aldermanic elections on the same day – 8 December 2022 in this case – comes straight out of the alderperson’s tried and tested anti-democratic playbook. It lessens the chances of any outside candidate challenging the incumbents seeking re-election. In this instance, Langley has drawn the short straw on that. Incumbent alderpersons get to choose the date of election for their office, and this is yet another City civic matter that requires democratic reform.
From our perspective as City residents. Langley has been a poor councillor who has voted with the Guildhall establishment against the things we want and need – for example against using City’s Cash to speed up long overdue estate repairs (scroll down this link to see her recorded vote on this issue). Perhaps even business voters were shocked by Langley’s blatant appeasement of the Chinese government when she said “I know I hate to see injustice of any kind, but …” during a haltingly delivered speech that starts at 46:47 of this recording of the meeting of the Court of Common Council on 7/10/21.
Whether Langley has been a good senior councillor from a business voter perspective is a moot point. Regardless, Umradia – for reasons we’ll explore below – would be no more suitable as an alderperson than Langley. Obviously, it is undemocratic business voters who will decide the Aldgate contest. Nonetheless, we’d hope that at least some of them would be concerned enough by Langley’s refusal to take a stand on genocide in East Turkestan and repression throughout China and the territories occupied by the Chinese government – not just Hong Kong, Tibet and East Turkestan – to want to see her replaced, if a good replacement could be found.
Shai Umradia’s initial flyer about the upcoming Aldgate aldermanic election.
Umradia’s claim not to know why Langley is standing for re-election 18 months early in the leaflet reproduced above is puzzling, since the obvious reason for her to do this is so that she might make a run at becoming aldermanic sheriff – as a necessary step to seeking ‘election’ as lord mayor, To do this convincingly she needs to be able to demonstrate she has sufficient time in office as a senior councillor to carry out the role. Umradia ought to know this.
Umradia is probably correct to assume Langley hoped to be re-elected unopposed, as so often happens for a variety of posts in the last rotten borough – among which can be counted the office of sheriff for the last few years and the five common council seats in Aldgate in the 2017 common council ‘election’.
Moving on, Umradia stating in his election leaflet he’s been ‘overwhelmed’ by the number of those who encouraged him to stand for Aldgate alderperson strikes us as either an over-emotional or a disingenuous claim. At the time he put this flyer out, we’d be surprised if there was anyone other than Tim McNally – more on him later – urging Umradia to stand as a senior councillor.
In his election campaign material Umradia presents himself as an ‘experienced leader’ but this left us wondering of what? The Aldgate Ward Club of which he is president? One or more of the various masonic lodges he mentions belonging to on his register of interests? He certainly isn’t a leader at the City of London council, to which he was first elected just over half a year ago.
Returning to Umradia’s register of interests, we’re puzzled as to why it doesn’t include what as far as we can determine is his main job, as an employee at estate agent Brooke Carter in London. Instead Umradia’s RoI just lists his work as a consultant with a small payroll services company in Bristol and as a director of a small computer services company in London – his wife, who has a day job in HR, is the other director at the latter. Scroll down this archived link (or the live version) and you’ll see the Umradia is employed in a sales position at Brooke Carter. A screenshot of the section of this company’s contact page featuring Umradia is reproduced immediately below.
We haven’t previously come across anyone advising global corporations “at board level” and governments “at the highest levels” while also holding down a day job with an estate agent. Therefore we wonder if the claims Umradia makes on his campaign material (see above, and in particular the front of his first flyer) are misleading or if he can actually substantiate them? The seeming disparity between the high-flying career Umradia presents himself as enjoying and what we found when we looked, reminded us of another City councillor we’ve been covering lately – Luis Tilleria. By co-incidence, both councillors’ statements to support their candidacy for membership of the council’s Audit & Risk Management Committee earlier this year (scroll down link) appeared next to each other in City of London paperwork linked to the appointments. These are reproduced immediately below.
Reading these Audit & Risk Committee application support statements, we struggle to understand how Tilleria could have possibly owned an ‘international real estate business for the past 7 years’ (i.e. between 2015 & 2022) as stated, when he was declared bankrupt just four years ago (in 2018). Likewise, and as indicated in an earlier post with some circumstantial evidence (scroll down to the notes at the end), Tilleria may not have been awarded some of the academic qualifications he appears to lay claim to.
Does anyone actually check support statements when they are submitted by City councillors – and more specifically did anyone at the Corporation investigate whether the claims made in the statements reproduced here from Tilleria and Umradia could be verified?
As is the case with Tilleria, Umradia’s activities as a company director are split between different versions of his name at Companies House where he appears as both Shailendra Kumar Kantilal Umradia and Shailendra Umradia (at least twice – here and here). Both these councillors use variations on their names as it suits them, which makes tracing their activities more tricky than it would be otherwise.
As Umradia’s flyers indicate, he has an election website but as we were writing this post it was not fully functional and so we had to rely on his printed material for information. Below is a screenshot of the website as we were seeing it this week.
Note the address on the website is the one Tim McNally used as his home address on the nomination form when he successfully stood for the City council in Aldgate in March this year. It is different to the address in Middlesex used by Umradia both in the current aldermanic election and in the common council elections in March.
McNally is a more experienced politician than Umradia, having been a Liberal Democrat councillor in Southwark from 2006 to 2014 (scroll down to results from Chaucer ward to see his first successful and last unsuccessful stands as a LibDem candidate there). Despite successfully standing as an ‘independent’ in Aldgate, McNally includes membership of the Liberal Democrats, Association of Liberal Democrat Councillors and National Liberal Club Benevolent Fund (a charity that gives small amounts of money to a handful of retired National Liberal Club staff) on his council register of interests.
Looking back at Umradia and McNally’s election to the council earlier this year, it is clear they controlled the domain and website used to promote a slate of successful councillors in the ward – since it is now being used to promote Umradia for alderperson.
The common council slate in March managed to defeat incumbent Hugh Fenton Morris who didn’t join it. Having the support of the senior councillor in the ward must have helped them. It would seem the slate is currently split politically, since Mandeep Thandi who was part of it is a nominee for Sue Langley in the December alderperson election; while McNally – who Thandi nominated as a candidate in the March 2022 common council elections, as well as standing on a slate with him – is promoting and also nominated Umradia in the current election.
It seems unlikely Langley is still offering Umradia and McNally her support, as she did earlier in the year. We don’t know where David Sales and Andrien Meyers currently stand as regards Langley and Umradia – perhaps they’re playing it politically and waiting for the dust to settle before declaring their hands. Below is a screenshot of the aldgate.org website from 5 February 2022 as preserved at the Internet Archive.
Give the current use of the aldgate.org site to further Shai Umradia and Tim McNally’s political ambitions (see screen shot above with the home page displaying “Shai Umradia for Aldgate Alderman – Thursday 8 December 2022” message), not to mention the separate issue of McNally’s party political affiliations, few will now take the claim of a ‘united team of independent members working hard for businesses and residents in Aldgate Ward’ – that the same URL was displaying earlier this year – seriously.
Like the aldgate.org site, it seems that Umradia and McNally see the Aldgate Ward Club – which they already controlled prior to their election as councillors – as a vehicle for their political and personal ambitions. So the ward club’s social feeds feature posts reflecting their interests. For example, McNally and the National Liberal Club on Facebook (scroll down link).
Or Umradia’s interest in freemasonry represented with an Aldgate Ward Club tweet on Twitter about a visit to the United Grand Lodge of England (UGLE) in Covent Garden.
Meanwhile, parts of the Aldgate Ward Club website are ridiculously out of date. For example the page dedicated to detailing the officers and committee should have been updated around 5 years ago and several times since then – as can be seen from a screenshot we took yesterday and from an online archive version of the page also dating from 17 November 2022. You’d never guess from this that the current president of the club claims to be an IT expert – but then it seems to us that Umradia, with McNally lurking in the background, is more interested in what this institution can do for him, than in what he can do for the ward and the club.
It is also curious that Saif Masood who nominated Thandi for the March 2022 election, is now nominating Umradia in the upcoming aldermanic election, while Thandi has – as already mentioned – acted as a nominee for the incumbent Langley. Masood, himself, has been trying rather desperately to become a City councillor like his mother, who is part of the Guildhall establishment.
As our post last month covering Masood’s candidacy in the Bridge ward by-election on 3 November 2022 (scroll down link) will make clear, from our perspective falling back on him as a nominee signals that whoever does so is desperate for support – since we wouldn’t want to be associated with this self-styled ‘entrepreneur’.
The question of nominees brings us to the last candidate Elizabeth Anne Lange. Given how common her names and combinations of them are, we haven’t yet got much of a line on this candidate – and nor have our City contacts. What we did notice is that among her nominees is Jahangir Hussain, who nominated Luis Tilleria’s assistant – Camilia Kaerts – as an Aldgate candidate in the March 2022 common council elections, where she was defeated alongside Hugh Morris by those on the McNally ‘Aldgate Team’ slate. Anyone who has read our post about Kaerts and company’s attempted power grab at the City council, will know that we are less than impressed by her and her political allies.
Gossip in the Guildhall has it that Lange is being put up as a candidate to take votes away from Langley on the basis that their names are sufficiently similar for some disengaged and inattentive business voters to mistake the newcomer for the incumbent they intended to vote for, especially as Lange’s name will appear above Langley’s on the ballot paper. Obviously this is a rumour and we have seen no evidence to back up speculation of this type.
The Facebook profile of a woman who appears to live near the Upminster address given for Lange’s nomination and who seems to work at the The Coopers Company & Coborn School in that neighbourhood, is said by one Guildhall source to be the candidate. We reproduce a screenshot of part of this Facebook profile below but would stress the evidence for this being the candidate is to our eyes at best circumstantial – and we don’t take the matter as proven. The account has a handful of family posts and nothing on it to indicate City political ambitions.
Since we’ve raised issues around those making nominations, as background material we reproduce the official Statement Of Persons Nominated documents – which list nominees – both for the current aldermanic election and the common council elections in March this year, at the end of this post (scroll down).
It should also be noted – as is probably evident from what’s here and in some of our other posts – that given the tiny electorates in many wards, especially business vote dominated wards, it is often difficult for those who want to stand in City elections to find sufficient nominees. For this and many other reasons, the civic apparatus in the City of London is in urgent need of democratic reform.
The tensions between councillors in Aldgate ward as covered in this post, reflect broader conflicts at the Guildhall. Given the the financial shit storm that has been going down over the council not having the readies to pay for it capital-cum-vanity programme (Justice Quarter, new Museum of London etc.), splits in the City establishment are currently more readily evident than they have been for some years. Whether news of this has reached the majority of business voters is another matter – the results of the Bridge by-election earlier this month suggest to us that it hasn’t. If Aldgate voters aren’t yet fully aware of the financial difficulties facing the council, then we’d expect a Langley win.
Langley and Umradia provide a choice between a rock and a hard place, and we suspect Lange is no alternative to them either. That said, we don’t actually need an alternative to the likes of Langley and Umradia.
As we’ve noted in many previous posts, the City of London council is ridiculously over-numbered and abolishing the court of alderman would be a first step in cutting it down to size by eliminating 25 council seats. We need to reduce the current 125 councillors to around 2 in order to put the ratio of resident voters to councillors on a par with neighbouring London boroughs.
We reproduce below another of Umradia’s election flyers – note than in this more recent campaign material he lists his membership of Rotary International and states he belongs to the Insurers’ livery company but like his job at a firm of estate agents, neither is included on his register of interests linked to above. We view both Umradia’s campaign literature and his register of interests as deficient. Umradia also includes glowing testimonials in his latest campaign literature (below) but gives no source for them, leading us to wonder if he wrote them himself. Under these are a description of our header photo and the Statement Of Persons Nominated for the current and previous Aldgate ward election.
The header above shows Shai Umradia (right) role playing as a politician and business leader.
What”s extraordinary about the official nominations reproduced below is that all the candidates whose home address is listed give one that is not just outside the Aldgate ward, but also outside the City of London local authority area. Indeed, the majority of addresses here are in the Home Counties and either on the edge of Greater London or actually beyond it. In any normal local authority the majority of those standing as councillors would live where they are seeking election, so this serves to illustrate another way in which the business vote distorts democracy and leads to those with little stake in an area making decisions that have a massive negative impact on City residents (as well as those in bordering areas of neighbouring boroughs). 
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