A shadow was cast over the Olympic Games last night after it emerged that the £500m stadium is at the centre of a corruption scandal.
One of London’s biggest football clubs has been exposed for making secret payments to an executive on the body that awarded the stadium to the club after the Games are completed.
West Ham United made payments totalling £20,000 into the executive’s bank account before and after it was selected as the owner of the stadium in east London.
The money was paid to Dionne Knight, the Porsche-driving director of corporate services at the Olympic Park Legacy Company (OPLC), the quango that awarded the stadium to West Ham.
The arrangement was put in place by Ian Tompkins, a director of West Ham who masterminded its Olympic stadium bid. Knight and Tompkins are in a relationship together.
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Both executives were suspended on Friday after The Sunday Times confronted them with evidence of the payments.
They told reporters that Karren Brady, West Ham’s vice-chairwoman and a judge on BBC television’s The Apprentice, had known about the payments. They said it was for “consultancy work”.
However, Knight also admitted that she had not told her employers about the payments. The disclosures could force the government to reopen the bid for the Olympic stadium if West Ham is found to have acted improperly.
The information — detailed in bank and telephone records — was obtained by corporate investigators hired by Tottenham Hotspur, the Premier League club that was the loser in the contest for the stadium.
Tottenham is seeking a judicial review of the decision. The club refused to comment officially but a senior source said: “Clearly if West Ham had someone on the payroll from the OPLC and it can be proved that she had access to confidential information relating to the bids, there is no way it can’t go back and be reopened.”
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Knight, 34, who earns £84,000 a year, is one of a small number of directors on the OPLC, a government body set up to manage the handover of the stadium and the surrounding Olympic park.
The investigators were hired by Spurs two days before West Ham was voted the preferred bidder on February 11. Both clubs hoped to make the stadium their home ground. West Ham was the preferred bidder because it pledged to keep a running track inside the stadium.
Investigators obtained bank statements, credit reports, utility bills and telephone records for Knight and Tompkins. Knight was placed under surveillance. They established that four payments had gone into Knight’s bank account between December and April from a West Ham United account at the Bank of Scotland, for £566, £1,302, £3,400 and £4,600. They say there was a further sum of £4,800 in June.
This weekend Knight admitted receiving a total of £20,400 from West Ham and said it was for consultancy work. The arrangement was made two months before West Ham won the bid. She had initially refused to say what the work was. Yesterday her lawyer said it was “a procurement contract in relation to the stadium”.
Knight had informed the OPLC about her relationship with Tompkins but admitted she had not told it about the cash from West Ham. She accepts this was wrong but denies leaking confidential information.
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West Ham faces questions about why it commissioned the work before it had even won the bid and why it sanctioned payments. The club, relegated from the Premier League last season, said Brady had been led to believe that the OPLC had approved Knight’s consultancy work. It would give only scant details of the work.
In a statement, the OPLC said Knight had told it about her relationship with West Ham’s bid director and measures were taken to ensure she had no access to sensitive information.