CBWRA tried to avoid vote on ratification of the CBWRA committee – and then refuses to report numbers voting against ratification

As previously reported, the CBWRA June AGM was a farce even by CBWRA standards (see below). One important strand of the games apparently played by CBWRA was to try to avoid a vote on the ratification of the CBWRA committee.

There have never been elections for the CBWRA committee, presumably because CBWRA are aware that most of their committee members are virtually unknown to most residents and have never produced any manifesto or evidence of what they have done or stand for. Of course, CBWRA also want to avoid elections which might mean that people who are in any way critical of CBWRA could join the committee. The current system is therefore basically cronyism and a total lack of accountability by CBWRA committee members.

Typically only 4 to 5 committee members even attend their own committee meetings (unsurprising since no meaningful discussion or decision-making occurs at these meetings) and usually we only have the ‘co-chairs’ bothering to attend quarterly meetings with leaseholders (from which no notes are produced – the excuses from CBWRA being that they want to ”keep the meetings informal” and that they wish to avoid the work of compiling notes). The Co-chairs are also against producing meaningful notes from official meetings such as annual general meetings, it would seem.

So instead of elections, CBWRA changed the constitution so that there would only be ‘ratification’ of the committee. i.e. the co-chairs decide who can be on the committee and then people attending the AGM can vote to ‘ratify them’. The constitution states there will only be an election if more than 20 people apply to join the committee (a pretty unlikely scenario given how centralised control has become). Of course, with only a tiny percentage of residents attending the AGM, and an even tinier percentage having any idea who the committee members are or what they have done or achieved,  they tend to give them the benefit of the doubt. Ratification means that there is no way for leaseholders to vote against individual committee members (e.g. those who have been the subject of multiple police complaints or who have track records of online bullying or who have posted large numbers of anti-semitic and pro terrorist  tweets).

Ratification’ means that the ‘Co-Chairs’ can  choose the committee and then you can vote for or against the whole group. i.e. a meaningless rubber stamp which prevents fair elections to the committee and means that people you have never heard of (or in some cases people who are not even leaseholders at Chelsea Bridge Wharf) are voting on important decisions that involve your service charge money and the way in which this development is run.

However, at the 2024 AGM, CBWRA went a step further and tried to avoid not just elections for the committee but also  a vote on ratification. Ratification was simply not mentioned at the meeting until I raised it. The CBWRA committee then stated that they thought a vote on ratification was not necessary because fewer than 20 people had applied to join the committee. Now, it is quite possible that this was incompetence, a lack of understanding of the bizzare constitution which they themselves designed, but the April 2024 committee meeting notes show that CBWRA were well aware that a ratification vote would be needed at the AGM in June.

The AGM notes, which were not circulated until 3 weeks after the meeting, contain no record of the number of members who voted against ratification of the committee. It simply says that the committee was ratified. There is no mention that I forced the vote to happen or that the Co-chairs resisted it. The notes contain no record of anything which I or other residents said during a 90 minute meeting, apart from 5 bullet points all of which omit all criticism of the CBWRA committee and the text of the motions submitted.

The notes do not state how many members attended the AGM nor whether the meeting was quorate. The number of proxy votes is not given.

Strangely, ‘ratification’ has been retroactively added to the agenda, to give the impression that CBWRA had always planned to hold a vote on it when clearly they did not.

The names of the proposed committee (see below) were not circulated until about 2 hours before the AGM, which is further evidence of games-playing in my view and obstructing any chance of meaningful leaseholder involvement in selection of the CBWRA committee.

All of these desperate attempts reflect the equally pathetic attempts to manipulate the Chair elections in 2024 and 2023.

It is the responsibility of the Secretary to produce accurate meeting notes, not to write highly selective and biased accounts which do not come close to an accurate or complete record of the AGM, although I suspect these notes are largely written by the ‘co-chairs’. How can residents possible have any confidence in this group of people to run a £5 million + service charge budget (if Right to Manage succeeds) when they show such contempt for proper processes and checks and balances. when they show such contempt for residents’ intelligence? Well whether we have confidence or not does not matter – because they do not plan to allow elections for Directors of the Right to Manage company.

Incidentally the AGM notes also show that no serious analyses of Building Safety Act costs has been carried out, as I suspected.  CBWRA just vaguely asked around (to an unnamed agent…probably Urang) and then decided that BSA costs at CBW are average for London. This is CBWRA’s feeble justification for not challenging the Building Safety Act costs (£400,000)  at Chelsea Bridge Wharf, as I have proposed, despite ample evidence from TPI and the government that managing agents are inflating Building Safety Act costs.

Hilariously, CBWRA list one of their 2023 achievements as ‘Increased and endeavoured to improve communications with members and the wider community’. Utterly shameless cant and Orwellian newspeak.

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Dodgily elected Chairs

Co-Chair Larisa Villar Hauser
Co-Chair Louis-Sebastian Kendall

Unelected CBWRA Committee

Treasurer Toby Spoerer
Secretary Katherine Greenway
Community Liaison Officer Jean Dornhofer
Committee Member Kirt Bains
Committee Member Stephen Thompson
Committee Member Catherine Thomé

Unelected Building Reps

Burnelli – Larisa Villar Hauser
Centurion – Catherine Thomé
Eustace – Stephen Thompson
Hawker – Vishwa Jethu
Horace – Kirt Bains
Howard – Toby Spoerer
Lanson – Keith Fryer
Oswald – Jovdat Guliyev
Warwick – Louis-Sebastian Kendal