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The council boss who was paid £135,000 a year not to go to work for six and a half years has attacked his former employers in his first in-depth public interview.

Anthony O’Sullivan said his time off work on full pay since being first suspended and later put on “special leave” had been “awful”.

The 60-year-old former Caerphilly council chief executive also spoke of the toll his public humiliation had taken on his family and insisted he had done nothing wrong.

And he said that he had been good at his job and “hugely popular with staff” but had been “hung out to dry” by senior councillors who had initially approved huge pay rises for senior staff at the secret meeting, which was at the centre of the controversy.

Mr O'Sullivan was paid more than £1m from the public purse in pay and pensions from his first suspension in March 2013 until his sacking last month.

Asked to respond to those who would say he had nothing to complain about after being on full pay without responsibilities for so long, he said: “It’s an utterly unfair characterisation. The first point I want to make is that in six and a half years I have not received a single welfare visit from the council.

“My employer, who has a duty of care to me, has not in six and a half years conducted a welfare visit, which will also be something for the tribunal to consider.

“It’s been awful and the idea that I’ve been sitting around doing nothing is ridiculous. If you are the subject of criminal allegations you spend every waking hour dealing with them. I have been absolutely inundated with documentation.

"I need to research matters. I need to prepare myself, I need to brief counsel who are acting on my behalf. This has not been an extended holiday by any stretch of anybody’s imagination.

"What I have endured I would not wish on my worst enemy, frankly, and when you factor into all that it’s difficult enough that my career was being destroyed, my personal life was being destroyed, that I was then getting vilified in the press repeatedly – it was all about me, not about anybody else.”

Mr O’Sullivan was first suspended in early 2013 after the Assistant Auditor General for Wales said he had acted unlawfully when recommending himself for a secret salary increase of £26,000 in 2012, to £158,000 a year. In total 21 senior officers would have received pay rises at a time most staff had their pay frozen.

He and two other officials later faced criminal charges of misconduct in a public office, which were dismissed by a judge at Bristol Crown Court in late 2015 on the grounds that “what at worst the defendants ... were endeavouring to achieve, unattractive though it may have been, was avoiding public scrutiny of new remuneration levels”.

The saga only ended in October this year when Mr O’Sullivan was fired on the basis of an independent report for Caerphilly council which concluded he had been "grossly negligent (if not reckless)" and had "wilfully breached his contract".

Mr O’Sullivan said that it was not as simple as it had been portrayed and that it had been a traumatic time.

He said: "If it was as clear as that it wouldn’t have taken six and a half years. It knocks you back enormously.

“To face up to that, to be resilient, to carry on in as normal a manner as possible for the sake of my family and others was very, very difficult. I have not had a cushy time at all.

“I have things around me in place that support me through difficult times. I have a very strong Catholic faith which has helped enormously. It always has throughout my entire life.

“My family are okay. It’s been particularly tough for my younger son, who was still at school when this all started, and was taunted on the basis of what appeared in the press.”

(Image: Richard Swingler) (Image: Richard Swingler)

Asked whether he had ever thought about resigning, Mr O’Sullivan said: “No – I had my dream job. I’m not being immodest to say I was actually quite good at it.

“I was hugely popular with the staff and with the members. Don’t be in any doubt whatever about that. I pushed forward difficult things, hadn’t shied away from anything, but presented them with the need, the reason, the rationale for doing it. And I also worked extremely hard.

“Those are, in my view, incontrovertible facts. I did not want to go anywhere else. I am a resident of the South Wales Valleys, I was born in the South Wales Valleys and I absolutely loved working there. My family is very happy living in Merthyr Tydfil. We have no desire to leave the town.”

He said that during his time away from work he had decided not to respond to the publicity.

“I’ve declined. People have been to my front door and I’ve turned them away. I have tried to behave impeccably throughout this so as not to compromise the process in any way at all.

“It’s been David versus Goliath. All the resource [of the council] has been mobilised against me. They’ve spent £1.5m on legal advice in an effort to intimidate and crush and tarnish me, and it’s difficult to face that down. But that’s what I’ve done.”

Asked what degree of abuse he had been subjected to, Mr O’Sullivan said: “Read the comments underneath your own [WalesOnline] articles.

“The level of threat, physical violence, where does he live, let’s go and get him, let’s get his house, let’s get his car, let’s go after him under the Proceeds of Crime Act. As I’ve said, it’s not what I’d wish on my worst enemy.”

During his period away from the office he picked up around £1m in pay and pension contributions.

Describing how the scandal had started, Mr O’Sullivan said discussions about a review of the authority’s senior officers’ salary structure had begun when it was led by Plaid Cymru before May 2012.

He said: “The report in September 2012 [that recommended the rises] included a rationalisation of senior posts. That had been discussed from, I suppose, almost a year beforehand, when additional duties were being allocated to senior staff.

“At that time Plaid Cymru were in charge. There is never a good time to discuss senior pay – in the immediate approach to an election that certainly isn’t the time. So they weren’t keen to deal with it in the early part of 2012 because there was an election in May.”

He said there was an accepted view by senior councillors that there would be the need to have a review at an appropriate point.

“They [senior members] were also aware of the additional duties that staff had taken on and they were very pleased with progress we were making on a number of fronts.

“They were also conscious that we were losing staff to smaller authorities and, when a senior member of staff in social services left to go to a much smaller authority for a 30% pay rise, that really sparked things off. If you get social services wrong you can forget everything else.

“We had 385 children under our auspices being protected at the time and this was the head of children’s services [who was leaving]. We’d had the awful death of a toddler on Lansbury Park [a housing estate in Caerphilly] a few years before and these were serious issues. You want the best staff. We lost a really good member of staff to a much smaller authority. They [the Plaid-led authority] realised then that we needed to put a pay structure in that would enable us to retain and to recruit the best quality of staff we could.

“The trade-off for that, which I then presented to the Labour group when they were elected, was that we would deliver £1m-worth of savings from the last time this was reviewed. And that is what we did.

“We’d been losing senior staff over time, not replacing them, not making them redundant, assigning their duties to others – including myself. I was doing two jobs. I was the director of the environment and I was the chief executive. I had 2,000 more staff reporting to me than my predecessor. That alone saved in the region of £250,000 because there was no secretarial support to go with it either.

“The Labour Party was presented with the need to address it – the loss of senior staff. The way you do it politically is to have £1m-worth of savings. They then promised that would be their line in public.

“The whole cabinet had been briefed. The whole cabinet endorsed the way forward. That included Dave Poole [until recently the council leader], who sat on the committee [which approved the pay rises] as did Keith Reynolds [then the deputy leader], Gerald Jones, now the MP for Merthyr Tydfil, who was also a deputy leader at the time. The whole cabinet knew what needed to be done and they backed it to the hilt.”

(Image: Richard Swingler)

Mr O’Sullivan said he had not written the report which recommended hefty pay increases for himself and 20 other senior officers even though it appeared under his name.

He said: “It was written in my name by Gareth Hardacre. It’s not unusual at all. I tidied it up so it represented my style more than Hardacre’s. He wrote it, he was our sole contact with Hay [the consultants who undertook the pay review]."

Mr O’Sullivan denied that it had been unlawful for him to write the report, a suggestion made by Anthony Barrett, the Assistant Auditor General for Wales, in a public interest report published by the Wales Audit Office. Mr O’Sullivan quoted from the Local Government Act 1989 which said it was his duty as chief executive to recommend the numbers and grades of staff.

“That includes myself, so there was nothing unlawful about me writing or presenting a report.”

According to Mr O’Sullivan the only unlawful element of what occurred was the failure to advertise the meeting at which the decision to increase the senior officers’ salaries was taken.

“That was because at a time when I actually was on holiday so I wasn’t even in Wales. They failed to advertise the meeting properly. In his report Mr Barrett said that was down to human error by a committee clerk.”

When the reasons for the criminal case against Mr O’Sullivan, his deputy Nigel Barnett, and monitoring officer Daniel Perkins were released, it was revealed that Judge William Hart accepted there was no evidence Mr O’Sullivan knew about the failure to advertise the meeting.

He said the evidence against Mr Perkins was “material and potentially incriminating” but that the CPS’ submission that Mr O’Sullivan must have “played a part because of his position and evidence of close interest in… the matter” was “unpersuasive”.

Asked whether he had felt uncomfortable that a report recommending a potential £26,000 pay rise for himself was going out under his name, Mr O’Sullivan said: “No. It was my duty to do that. I would have felt more uncomfortable if it had gone out under somebody else’s name because people might have felt then that I somehow wasn’t endorsing the content. I cleared it with the cabinet and I briefed them fully over an extended period. They knew precisely what was involved. They knew the exact details of the pay rises involved and they backed it fully.”

Mr O’Sullivan said Hay had brought back data to show he was significantly underpaid in comparison with other local authority chief executives. “Of 100 people doing my job, I was number eight from the bottom,” he said.

While Hay recommended a rise to around £175,000 Mr O’Sullivan himself recommended a figure below the average salary, which didn’t take into account the fact that he was doing two jobs. The key point, he said, was that there was a £1m saving for the council.

“We took 10 senior jobs out, with their 10 secretaries, and didn’t spend a penny on redundancy, unlike Cardiff who at the time were expanding their senior team.”

Asked why if he had no intention of leaving it was reasonable for him to get the pay rise, Mr O’Sullivan said: “Different duties. The fact that it hadn’t been reviewed. If you don’t move the chief executive’s salary you can’t really move anyone else’s because they tend to be a percentage thereof.”

He said: “The pay scales are still in place. Everybody except me gets paid on those pay scales. The councillors endorse them year in, year out, because they know they are right.”

Mr O’Sullivan insisted that all five members of the committee that approved the pay rises – four Labour councillors and one Plaid councillor – voted for it.

Plaid’s James Fussell has claimed he did not vote for it but Mr O’Sullivan said: “I was sitting as close to James Fussell as I am to you [across a table] and I watched him specifically because I knew how the other four were going to vote because they told me in advance. He voted for it and I have given a sworn affidavit to the Ombudsman to that effect."

Asked why many councillors had apparently not known about the pay rises until details were leaked to the Western Mail, Mr O’Sullivan said he had no idea – and said the five members of the senior remuneration committee were representatives of their party groups.

“Those five councillors came fully briefed,” he said. “The Labour cabinet had given me an assurance they would back it. The only imponderable was how Plaid Cymru would vote – they had previously supported it in principle anyway. Five came on the day and voted unanimously for it.”

The minutes of the meeting said the new senior officers’ pay scale had been passed, although the report detailing the new salaries was not attached.

Mr O’Sullivan said he believed that once details of the pay rises had been leaked to the Western Mail, followed by uproar from the council’s staff and the public, councillors should have explained the reasons for the increases.

“It was a member decision,” he said. “Councillors had made a decision. They therefore had to go public to explain their decision. I could say nothing so I was completely hamstrung. I was being hung out to dry and they declined to say anything in public.”

Asked what he had said to the leadership of the council at the time, Mr O’Sullivan said he had told them: “You need to put a statement out.

“But they didn’t wish to acknowledge publicly what their own involvement was. The assurances they had given us, particularly from Keith Reynolds, who said repeatedly in private it was the right decision for the right reasons – we’ve saved £1m – they didn’t want to go out in public and say that. Then there was some involvement from the trade unions and they just shied away. Their view was this would go away over Christmas and we’ll come back in January and everything will be fine.

“They didn’t say anything in public, which let us all down extremely badly.”

(Image: Richard Swingler)

Asked how he felt about the fact that he personally had taken the flak for what happened, Mr O’Sullivan said: “I am deeply, deeply … it goes beyond disappointment at that. They should have stuck up for what they decided. They hung me out to dry in public, they allowed me to be scapegoated and vilified repeatedly.

"It became all about me and not about 20 other members of staff. You accept that to a degree because you’re the chief executive but when senior members of the experience and the stature of Harry Andrews, Keith Reynolds, David Poole, Gerald Jones say nothing in public then it is very disappointing.

“I was being destroyed and they also presented to their political opponents a complete open goal. They didn’t even reply to political statements that were made. It was awful.”

He said he believed they had acted that way because they were happy for him to take the flak and they could avoid it politically. "They were described by others involved in this as being spineless and being cowards and they ran away at the first sign of any danger.”

Asked what he had thought when he became aware that the police were investigating the issue, Mr O’Sullivan said: “I was disconcerted, as was everybody at the council, the councillors included. What made it more unusual was that you’d have thought that if the auditor had found any potential criminality he would have referred it to the police, but he hadn’t.

“I don’t think I thought I was ever going to face a charge quite frankly. I was confident nothing criminal had been done and I was just waiting for it to work its way through the system I suppose.

“I was sitting at home thinking they would go through documents and come to the conclusion there was nothing in this."

Mr O’Sullivan said that when a police investigation was launched he had a conversation with then council leader Harry Andrews. “He asked me after the auditor’s report had been published would I accept voluntary suspension for a quick couple of weeks so they could look into the matter and sort it out.

"I said: 'If you think that helps I’ll accept that on a voluntary basis'. Then on March 21, 2013, they took a report to full council changing the rules about suspensions, which allowed him to make a personal decision. Then he wrote to me saying he wished to formalise this suspension.”

Once he and two senior colleagues were charged with misconduct in a public office Mr O’Sullivan said they had enormous problems getting disclosure of relevant documents from the CPS.

Asked whether he had assumed that once the criminal charge was out of the way he would get reinstated to his job, Mr O’Sullivan said: “I assumed at that point that there was certainly the opportunity to discuss properly how things would go forward. That is what I presumed would occur and we were willing to enter discussions.

“It would have been the best way forward for everybody and I think they probably regret that they didn’t.

“I had been the subject of newspaper headlines. It suited them to keep the focus on me.”

Mr O’Sullivan said that when his two colleagues accepted severance payments he had been more concerned about getting his job back.

He said: “I made that very clear. They weren’t totally receptive to that and I wasn’t particularly keen to settle.”

Mr O’Sullivan confirmed that at that time the council would have been prepared to pay him a substantial amount of money.

But he said: “It wasn’t about money for me and it isn’t about money for me now. It’s about trying to find out the truth in this matter.”

He said it had taken a very long time to get minutes of council meetings that took place in 2006 disclosed to him so he could demonstrate that at the time of an earlier pay review senior officers had been present at crucial meetings but, unlike him in the 2012 meeting, had not been expected to declare an interest.

Mr O’Sullivan said he had been surprised that a “designated independent person” (DIP) had recommended that he should be dismissed.

“My view remains that I have not done anything wrong,” he said.

Asked how he felt when he was dismissed, he said: “Very, very disappointed. Prejudiced. I thought I hadn’t had a fair hearing and I thought the decision was made on political grounds. Having kicked me in the way they have for a very long time I thought that was the final example of what was done.

“One thing – after 18 months of investigation the DIP said she had found no evidence of dishonesty on my behalf. I think that is a very fundamental and important thing. To me, that matters enormously.”

Mr O’Sullivan said that since being dismissed he had not submitted a claim to Caerphilly council for a total of more than £300,000 he claimed he was owed.

He said a report produced by the council which detailed claims totalling £319,000 had come “out of the blue” to him. “Presumably that’s based on discussions held in 2017,” he added.

At that time “without prejudice” negotiations took place between barristers representing Mr O’Sullivan and the council during which the claim was put forward. “Without prejudice” negotiations have no formal status before an agreement is reached.

Mr O’Sullivan said: “That is how the council has behaved towards me for six or seven years. We’re in ‘you couldn’t make it up’ territory and we have been for a very long time.

“But there are contractual issues which are contractual issues. That’s what the law says – you can’t get away from that.

“Four years ago, when the criminal case was dismissed, I said: ‘Can you reimburse me my legal fees incurred in defending myself successfully against a criminal prosecution?' This was brought against me on the basis of a complaint made by two serving members of the council. The Indemnity Provisions 2006 specifically allow for that so that someone in my position can’t be subject to false allegations and become bankrupted as a result.”

So far as other elements of the claim were concerned Mr O’Sullivan said he had been put on a spot salary for the duration of the administration that lasted until 2017. That agreement lapsed in April 2017, so the issue must now be addressed.

He said that once the story about the claim had been published extensively across the UK, with councillors coming under pressure on social media, it was inevitable that all elements of the claim would be turned down.

He had voluntarily withdrawn a claim for nearly £160,000 in holiday pay.

Mr O’Sullivan is now taking his case for unfair dismissal to an employment tribunal – a process that could take up to a year.

A spokesman for Caerphilly council said: “There are a number of factual inaccuracies and misleading statements contained within the article. However, as Mr O’Sullivan has stated he plans to make an application to an employment tribunal, we will contest these issues at that stage rather than through the pages of the media.

“We stand by our decision to dismiss Mr O’Sullivan for gross misconduct after following the proper statutory employment process and we will vigorously defend this position.”

Cllr Dave Poole and former councillor Gerald Jones, who is seeking re-election as the MP for Merthyr Tydfil & Rhymney, declined to comment because of Mr O’Sullivan’s tribunal.

Cllr Fussell maintains that he did not vote for the senior officers’ pay deal in 2012.

Cllr Colin Mann, current leader of the Plaid Cymru opposition group on Caerphilly Council, said: “Mr O’Sullivan seeks, wrongly, to link Plaid Cymru to the senior officers’ pay scandal.

“Pay rises for already highly paid officers were raised by Mr O’Sullivan but the late former Plaid leader Allan Pritchard and other senior members, including myself, opposed salary increases for top officers.”

Former councillors Harry Andrews and Keith Reynolds are now deceased.