From
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/...n-mayor-london

The new London mayor, Sadiq Khan, is investigating his predecessor’s
conduct over the procurement process for London’s planned £175m garden
bridge.

Khan, having completed his first week in office, has already begun
scrutinising Boris Johnson’s decisions relating to the controversial
project, to which £60m of public money has been allocated in circumstances
previously criticised by parliamentary spending officials as unorthodox. An
official report concluded that the process to select a designer for the
bridge was unfair and that the office of the previous mayor was “less than
honest” about his role in the process.

A spokesman for Khan said: “He is only in his first days in the role but he
is looking in more detail at some of the issues raised about the
procurement.”

The new mayor’s intervention could derail a project that has attracted
considerable criticism. The proposed bridge has secured vast sums of public
money despite being initially promoted as entirely private-funded. It has
recently been bedevilled by accusations that its designer was selected
before the actual tender process began.

The oversight committee of the Greater London Authority (GLA) found that
Johnson and his team met the successful bidder, the designer Thomas
Heatherwick, five times to discuss the concept before the procurement
process began. Last month official documents emerged revealing that the
then mayor was “keen” for Heatherwick’s design to be selected before the
supposedly open contest was held.

Khan’s comments coincide with fresh evidence of unease within Transport for
London (TfL) over the project from the outset, with documents showing that
its finance chief considered the bridge an extremely expensive proposal
compared with other Thames crossings, such as the Millennium Bridge, which
cost £22m.

Documents also show that as late as December 2012 – weeks before the
official tender process began – senior TfL officials wondered why
alternatives to the garden bridge had not been explored and whether the
location on the South Bank was appropriate.

It has also emerged that one of Johnson’s last acts as mayor was to lower
the fundraising threshold for the bridge in an apparent attempt to ensure
the project went ahead. Despite previously insisting that the “maintenance
costs will not be borne by the public sector”, Johnson last year agreed
that the GLA would act as guarantor of the bridge’s upkeep if efforts to
raise funds by the Garden Bridge Trust proved insufficient.

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