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Conservative Councillor guilty of vote rigging

Slough Conservative councillor Eshaq Khan was found guilty at a special High Court election hearing in Slough council chamber of corrupt and illegal practices to secure his election.

He was stripped of his seat and banned from standing for office for five years. He now faces a police inquiry.

Khan, 50, won his marginal seat in Central Ward after his team registered hundreds of “ghost voters” in the month before the election and cast votes using fraudulent postal ballots.

He and his team compounded the fraud with a botched cover-up that included poorly forged tenancy agreements and statements from bogus voters, and an attempt to intimidate a witness. Thames Valley Police said that it would widen its inquiry into the case in light of the judge’s accusations of perjury and attempts to pervert the course of justice by supporters of Khan.

The election team registered fictitious voters at derelict houses and claimed that as many as 12 voters were living at two-bedroom flats or three-bedroom houses. Khan beat Lydia Simmons, his Labour opponent, by 120 votes but Labour contested the result by bringing an election petition to overturn the result after almost 450 voters were added to the electoral register in the final weeks before the poll, almost all of whom voted by post for the Conservatives.

Labour succeeded in striking 145 “ghost voters” from the electoral roll. The judge accepted that the true figure was likely to run into hundreds.

 Witnesses included a handwriting expert, Kim Hughes, who said that 198 of the postal ballot forms were filled in by Mohammed Basharat Khan, described by the judge as “a serial forger”, and another 79 were in the handwriting of the candidate.

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