News

Lyons moves against www.rogerlyons.com

The General Secretary, Roger Lyons, has sent a veiled letter (click here) to David Beaumont, the owner of the anti-corruption web site, www.rogerlyons.com alleging breach of rule 30. This rule states:

"No written material of any kind may be circulated in support of a candidate in any national election within the union without the approval of the NEC."

Embarrassingly the General Secretary was obliged to attach a photocopy of the front page of the site, a large cartoon of himself as Homer Simpson.

The offending single line on www.rogerlyons.com asked visitors to vote for the left candidate in the NEC election, and was put there without any involvement of the candidate in response to the website of the right wing contender, www.leoniecooper.com , which is still live and blatantly breaks rule 30.

There is prima facie evidence that Ms Cooper's website was set up by MSF itself, which would be illegal if true as well as being an outrageous attempt to rig the election. Her site resides on the same computer server as the official MSF site. This is an unlikely coincidence given the millions of servers in the world. Furthermore the name www.leoniecooper.com was registered by William Martin Productions according to Register.com . William Martin productions list as one of their clients (click on the 'clients' link on their site) none other than MSF!

MSF also allowed an advert for the site to accompany the ballot paper sent to every member.

It is easy to check that the website resides on the same computer server as the official MSF website www.msf.org.uk . (LyonsWeb is not responsible for the content of external internet sites) Anyone can discover this by using the 'ping' command from any PC. Both sites return the same information, below:

C:\WINDOWS>ping www.msf.org.uk

Reply from 195.72.164.141: bytes=32 time=127ms TTL=55

C:\WINDOWS>ping www.leoniecooper.com

Reply from 195.72.164.141: bytes=32 time=124ms TTL=55

David has referred the complaint against him straight to his branch, as per the rulebook. Rule 17 states that in all cases apart from misappropriation or racism/sexism the branch must investigate and send a recommendation to the NEC. If the NEC are of the opinion that the branch is unable to consider the matter, part (e) allows them to refer it to the Regional Council.

Lyons' letter indicates he intends to bypass both these rules and go straight to the NEC, a blatant but not innovative breach of disciplinary procedure.

www.rogerlyons.com has been under close scrutiny since it was set up a year ago. Lyons is thought to have received an initial legal opinion that nothing could be done against it. Clearly the site is being monitored intensively as the offending line stayed up for 1 day only. David believes that MSF paid lawyers check it regularly and he has to take considerable efforts to avoid libel.

Posted by www.rogerlyons.com on 8th June 2001