Sir Sadiq Khan is facing an official investigation into his decision to accept free tickets to Taylor Swift’s sell-out concerts in London last year.
The City Hall watchdog is to examine whether the London mayor ‘exercised an appropriate level of caution’ when he accepted freebies to her Eras tour worth £3,000.
Tory Susie Hall, who was beaten in the mayoral election last year, demanded a probe into his decision to take six tickets worth £500 each for the global superstar’s appearances at Wembley Stadium in the summer.
He attended a performance on August 15, after she and her entourage were provided with a police escort to get to the venue in north west London, after a previous gig in Austria was cancelled over a bomb threat.
Questions have been raised over the VIP treatment Ms Swift was given, with the cost of policing the concerts rising by more than £150,000 after the pop megastar was handed a blue-light escort.
A Greater London Authority (GLA) spokesman said: ‘The monitoring officer has reviewed the complaint against the mayor and will not be investigating three of the four allegations.
‘An investigation will now take place to establish if the mayor exercised an appropriate level of caution in deciding to accept the tickets.’
The three other allegations reportedly related to the mayor declaring’s the tickets late, an inaccurate initial declaration that valued the tickets at less than £200 each and whether donor LS Events had given them to the mayor while bidding for a contract.
The City Hall watchdog is to examine whether the London mayor ‘exercised an appropriate level of caution’ when he took accepted freebies worth £3,000.
He attended a performance on August 15, after she and her entourage were provided with a police escort to get to the venue in north west London, after a previous gig in Austria was cancelled over a bomb threat.
Questions have been raised over the VIP treatment Ms Swift was given, with the cost of policing the concerts rising by more than £150,000 after the pop megastar was handed a blue-light escort.
Ms Hall said: ‘Whilst I welcome an investigation into the propriety of accepting these tickets, after months of asking Khan for answers, I am disappointed that the Monitoring Officer isn’t considering the fact that the Mayor declared these tickets late, initially misdeclared who donated them, that they were also undervalued, or that the donor was a GLA contractor. More answers are desperately needed.’
Sir Sadiq’s spokesman said: ‘Any gift accepted by the mayor is declared openly and transparently.
‘In this case there was an administrative error which was corrected. The mayor has no involvement in the procurement process for GLA events, nor in the tendering of these contracts.
Politicians were last year accused of pressuring Scotland Yard into providing a police escort for her entourage to the stadium in north west London in August using the Special Escort Group. They later attended some of the gigs for free.
It came after a suicide bomb threat forced Swift to cancel a previous concert in Austria, although there was no specific threat made against the five nights in the UK capital.
Quizzed at a London Assembly session in October, Mr Khan insisted he had ‘never interfered in operational matters as far as the police are concerned’. But he acknowledged he ‘regularly’ spoke to the commissioner about major events happening in the capital.
Published figures showed that policing three nights of the tour at Wembley in June, before the threat to the concert in Vienna, cost police £68,852.33 per night, for a total of £206,557.
But when Swift returned to the UK in August, after the bomb threat, her five nights cost £99,678.21 per night, for a total of £498,391.05.
This suggests that the August dates cost more than £30,000 per night more to police than the June ones. The majority of the costs were for staffing, though there is no breakdown by unit or role. Ms Swift contributed to the cost of the policing as well.
The number of officers involved also rose, from 111 per night in June, to 162 in August.