The Tynwald ombudsman has partially upheld a complaint against his predecessor in relation to a local authority’s handling of a land dispute.

Patrick Commissioners was thrown into turmoil last year when a report from the previous Tynwald Commissioner for Administration, Angela Main-Thompson, led to a series of resignations. Her report concluded that she had no hesitation in finding that the Patrick Commissioners’ handling of a complaint amounted to maladministration.

That complaint began as a dispute over damage to a verge on Glen Rushen Road and spilled over with one commissioner accused of using public funds to benefit himself. In her report, Mrs Main-Thompson accused that commissioner, who she referred to as Commissioner X, of an abuse of office and raised the question over whether local authority members should be surcharged either collectively or individually when their actions cost local ratepayers.

But Commissioner X then made a complaint to her successor as Tynwald ombudsman Paul Beckett, claiming certain aspects of the 2023 report has been unsatisfactory and the local authority clerk had failed to pass on all the relevant information.

He said he had been concerned he was being made a scapegoat but had been given no opportunity to put his case and prove his innocence. He wrote: ‘I have not been given any opportunity to present any evidence to your predecessor. This has resulted in me being accused of breaking one of the seven principles of public office, i.e. using public funds to open the road for the personal benefit of myself and two other farmers. I have never owned any land off [that] road.’ Mr Beckett stressed he would not re-investigate the original complaint but would consider whether all relevant information was passed to his predecessor, whether Commissioner X, who is still a serving commissioner, was given the opportunity to present his evidence, and whether the ombudsman had been right to conclude there had been maladministration based on the information she had received.

His report will be laid before the October Tynwald.

He finds there was no evidence that Mrs Main-Thompson had unreasonably failed to gather evidence from Patrick Commissioners and based on the information she had been supplied she had reasonable grounds to to conclude Commissioner X did not have the authority to carry out the works. But he concludes that his predecessor had been unreasonable in concluding that Commissioner X had breached the Nolan principles of public office because this was ‘wholly unsupported by the evidence’.

He said she was in error in relying on hearsay evidence of surveyor who was quoted as saying: ‘[Commissioner X] undertook some work in January to widen to the road by digging in to the uphill bank over a 20 metre length, which then provided him (and two other farmers) some access by vehicular – quad bikes and the like – so they could farm their land more effectively.’

Mr Beckett noted that his predecessor had not contacted the surveyor.

The current Tynwald Commissioner for Administration found no evidence in the investigation file to show that the complainant was contacted in order to follow up on his comments made in a telephone call or that any evidence was requested at any time by his predecessor concerning his personal circumstances.

Commissioner X had not been named in the report but claimed he had been the victim of trial by the media, his good name has been damaged, and had been put under undue pressure to resign from public office.

But Mr Beckett concluded that the previous ombudsman had done all that was possible to prevent his identification.