Birmingham\u2019s former lord mayor Mohammed Afzal\u00a0is facing investigation for election bribery for handing gifs to voters during his campaign.<\/p>\n
Labour politician Mr Afzal, 78, brought legal action seeking to overturn a result in council elections held in May last year.<\/p>\n
Mr Afzal, withdrew his election petition after a doorbell footage showed him with associates and appearing to hand over packets of dates bearing Labour Party stickers.<\/p>\n
One piece of footage showed the associates heard saying the package was \u201cfrom the Labour Party and Mr Afzal\u201d.<\/p>\n
In another, those receiving the package were then told to \u201cvote Labour number one\u201d.<\/p>\n
Following the emergence of the videos, Mr Afzal\u2019s barrister told High Court Judge Richard Foster it would be \u201cimpracticable\u201d to continue with the petition to overturn the vote.<\/p>\n
Mr Afzal was said to be standing in Aston, a\u00a0Labour stronghold where two Liberal Democrat candidates were instead elected.<\/p>\n
According to Judge Richard Foster, there was ‘conclusive evidence that indeed Mr Afzal, and his supporters did supply electors with packets of dates containing Labour Party stickers on a wide-spread basis during the campaign.’<\/p>\n
Mr Foster said the disputed election happened during Ramadan – in which eating dates was a traditional way for Muslims to round off their fast.<\/p>\n
The judge allowed Mr Afzal to withdraw his petition, commenting that there was ‘overwhelming evidence served on behalf of [his rivals] of illegal election practices in which he participated’.<\/p>\n
The judge said explained he was sending a copy of the judgement to the director of public prosecutions and awarded each of the victorious candidates an interim payment of \u00a310,000 towards their costs.<\/p>\n
Mr Afzal brought the petition after claiming that the Liberal Democrats, Ayoub Khan, a barrister and Mumtaz Hussain made ‘false allegations’ to sway voters in the ward.<\/p>\n
The 78-year-old was Britain’s first elected Muslim Pakistani councillor in 1982.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Birmingham\u2019s former lord mayor Mohammed Afzal\u00a0is facing investigation for election bribery for handing gifs to voters during his campaign. Labour politician Mr Afzal, 78, brought legal action seeking to overturn a result in council elections held in May last year. Mr Afzal, withdrew his election petition after a doorbell footage showed him with associates and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":64388,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,37,3,112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest","category-local-news","category-news","category-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64387"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64387\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64389,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64387\/revisions\/64389"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}