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For more than five years, the Welsh taxpayer has been paying a man called Tony more than £130,000 a year to do nothing.

He hasn’t been sick. He has just been off work doing whatever he wants. They currently call it "special leave".

In case you missed the anniversary of the start of Tony's 1,869 days off, it was March 8, 2013.

In that time, we've had two general elections, two Prime Ministers, an Assembly election, an EU election, voted to leave the EU, vicious cuts to council services and lots of other things. Tony has been off.

It is likely there will be another chance to mark the anniversary next year. Caerphilly council has just extended, until next summer, the temporary contract of the woman we have been paying £143,000 a year to do his job while he’s off .

When you add up all of the other costs relating to this farce, it would have been cheaper for the Welsh taxpayer to copy the 90s electronic band the KLF and burn £1m on a beach.

In fact, we could have done it several times over.

If you include the amounts the taxpayer has paid his colleagues Daniel and Nigel to do nothing, we could have had at least three £1m cash-burning parties in different parts of Wales just so everyone could appreciate the fact that it just kind of happened that our money ended up being wasted rather than spent on hospitals or schools or anything else vaguely useful.

Tony, Daniel and Nigel are Anthony O’Sullivan, Daniel Perkins and Nigel Barnett, the three senior officials at Caerphilly council who fatefully tried to get themselves enormous pay rises in 2012 .

It is easy to get worked up into a fury about them. A judge may have found that there was no criminal case to answer . But there is no question that there are serious questions about the way they went about getting enormous pay rises.

Mr O’Sullivan used a secretive sub-committee of councillors he recommended setting up to get approved a paper he wrote, at a meeting he attended and which which gave himself a £35,000 pay rise.

The Wales Audit Office called it unlawful. You or I might reach for less printable words. And it wasn't an isolated incident during Mr O'Sullivan's leadership. In the words of a separate Audit Office report, the council also "acted unlawfully" through a scheme to pay chief officers to buy out their car allowances and holidays.

Ever since the Audit Office reached its damning conclusions, Mr O'Sullivan has been on his extra long gap year. First he was suspended but for the last two years, that has been lifted and he has just been on "special leave" .

And that is the bigger scandal. The fact that this is still going on undermines the faith many of us try to have in the institutions which run our services.

Forget the ill-conceived police investigation or the failed court case, three experienced men have been doing nothing for five years.

The best paid of them, the man who is still in name the council’s chief executive Mr O’Sullivan, has picked up the best part of £700,000 in wages during that time.

The other two have collected around half a million pounds each, not including the £300,000 in compensation they shared between them last year to bring their part in this saga to an end.

Money that could have kept elderly day-care centres operating, refurbished playgrounds, fixed potholes, paved roads or done any number of valuable, important things that would have made people’s lives better has been wasted.

You could keep the borough's threatened Pontllanfraith leisure centre going just with Mr O'Sullivan's annual salary.

(Image: Huw James)

And who is responsible? Is anyone to blame for not doing their job properly? Has anyone conspired to engineer this farcical situation?

Heartbreakingly, the answer to all of those appears to be no.

There is no-one who can be sacked, disciplined or taken to court. There is no reassurance that this will ever change. Our councils are simply unable to manage senior staff when things go wrong.

You might call them heartless but private companies are better at doing this. People come back to work or people leave. If compensation needs to be paid, it is paid. If there needs to be a disciplinary process, it happens and is resolved.

Of course it is wrong to romanticise the private sector. The awful cases of abandoned employees who have to fight for recompense in the courts testifies to this.

And it is to be celebrated that our public bodies generally treat their staff better.

But there has to be a line. It cannot be acceptable to torch millions of pounds because of a seeming inability simply to say to a senior member of staff that a public institution can no longer have confidence in the advice he gives and his position is therefore untenable.

The victims of this are the most vulnerable people of Wales who depend on the services on which those millions should have been spent.

If Anthony O’Sullivan ever gets compensation, after being paid however many hundreds of thousands to do nothing for five years, it would be a shameful day for our system of government.

It would also be a shameful day for the politicians in Cardiff Bay and Westminster who have been unable to deal with the problems that undoubtedly exist in the most senior ranks of local authorities across the UK.

Perhaps we should all mark March 8 next year just to remind ourselves of this farce.