Sacha Lord has withdrawn his legal threat against The Mill

Dear Millers — a bit of good news to end the week: Sacha Lord has withdrawn his threat to sue The Mill. Six days after his lawyers threatened to file for defamation at the High Court if we didn’t unpublish and apologise for our story about his business Primary Events by 4pm on Tuesday, Lord announced in a lengthy statement last night that he is backing down.

“Following The Mill’s first article on 16 May 2024, in which very serious and damaging defamatory allegations were made, I instructed lawyers to commence legal proceedings,” the statement says. “However, I have decided not to pursue legal action for the time being, but will review this position on an ongoing basis. I believe legal proceedings would be a major distraction from my work and family life and I also do not wish to stifle The Mill’s freedom of expression even though — in this instance — I reject their allegations in the strongest terms.”

His decision follows the news on Wednesday that Arts Council England and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority are now both looking into the application through which Primary Events obtained more than £400,000 of support during the pandemic. Lord will “fully cooperate” with those probes and says he is confident they will exonerate him. You can read Lord’s statement in full here, alongside the Arts Council application submitted by his company.

We’ve had a huge response from readers since the statement was released last night. Media researcher Dr Rachel Broady called it a “genuinely fascinating bit of local journalism history”. “This whole episode is going to make a fascinating case study of new ways to fund journalism and engage your audience,” tweeted the journalism lecturer Anna Jones. The writer and former government advisor Sam Freedman tweeted: “This is what local journalism should be,” — adding: “In fact, if we're going to have more devolution — which I fully support — then this is what we *need* local journalism to be.”

In today’s edition, we look at Lord’s statement and reveal a few new details that prompted the Arts Council and the GMCA to change their stances earlier this week. That reporting includes a new source — a former senior staff member at Primary Events who worked there both before and after the application was made — who says staff knew what they were doing was wrong. “They were talking about basically making things up,” he told The Mill. “Fabricating things.” We also report on Andy Burnham’s response to the story after he was challenged by the BBC yesterday.

Normal service will resume tomorrow with a weekend read that is not about Sacha Lord. But if you have appreciated the journalism we’ve done this week and you’re not already a paying member, please join now. An astonishing 334 new members have joined in May so far, 272 of them since we published the first Lord story, making it our biggest month of growth ever. Those numbers — and the sheer volume of tips and messages we’ve received as part of our community fact-check — show how much people in this city appreciate investigative journalism that uncovers new things and stands up to powerful interests.

A huge thank you to all of our new and existing members. Our fourth birthday party is coming up, so if you’re a paying member, book your ticket in the members-only ‘footer’ at the bottom of this email. We often use our members’ events to talk about some of the big stories we’ve been working on, and this time there’s an obvious one to talk about. We’re looking forward to taking your questions and explaining why we took this stance.

Your Mill briefing

🌹 Labour clings on to power in Oldham, after a tense annual meeting on Wednesday evening. Labour lost majority control of Oldham council in the local elections, shrinking down from 31 seats to 27. Arooj Shah, Labour leader, negotiated a coalition with independent councillors to retain her lead, successfully fighting off a leadership bid from the Lib Dems, Conservatives and other independents. As part of the negotiations, Labour has promised yet another independent review into historical child sexual abuse in the borough, as well as extra funding for Shaw and Crompton.

🧑‍🦽 Accessibility advocate Zara Beth has received an apology from Metrolink, after she published a video of her encountering a broken lift at a tram stop and having to cross the tram tracks herself, hoisting her wheelchair up while looking out for incoming trams. Zara told the MEN the incident was “ironic”, as she was on her way to a meetup to discuss Manchester’s positive accessibility features.

🏛️ A nursery worker has been jailed for 14 years for the manslaughter of nine-month-old Genevieve Meehan, who she strapped and left on a beanbag for 90 minutes while Genevieve was coughing. Sentencing, Mrs Justice Ellenbogen says Genevieve’s death was “absolutely avoidable”.

Our weekend to do list

Friday

🍷 Craft brewery Track and natural wine bar Kerb are hosting a boozy party featuring DJ collective SheWillProvide, food from the bakery MUD Kitchen and pizza from Slice Culture. It’s free.

🎧 Abigail Ward, a house and electronica DJ who has curated sets for NTS, BBC 6 Music and Melodic Distraction, is performing at Ōdiobā in the Underbank. Perhaps best of all? It’s free.

Saturday

🎷 It’s the final weekend of Manchester Jazz Festival, and tickets are selling fast. There’s plenty to choose from, but a sure highlight has to be singer, cellist and saxophonist Laura Misch performing at Band on the Wall. Book tickets here and view the full programme here.

🪩 There’s live music all evening at Withington Public Hall, and it’s free entry. We recommend heading early for the craft beer and stonebaked pizza.

Bank Holiday Sunday

🎉 Deansgate Mews Festival returns this weekend, with plenty of live music across two stages on the lovely roof terrace, plus, art workshops, ping pong and a family-friendly silent disco. Find out more here.

🎸 Dreampop artists TTSFU, who recently performed to huge critical acclaim at Sounds from the Other City in Salford, are playing at YES. £7.

Bank Holiday Monday

🗿 There’s a new exhibition at HOME that aims to “recontextualise” the Friedrich Engels statue in Tony Wilson Place, featuring the perspectives and experiences of artists and writers from Ukraine. Find out more here.

🎨 Sick! Festival is a large-scale public art installation in Harpurhey Shopping Centre that explores community and what fear and safety looks like in the lives of people in Harpurhey, Moston and Charlestown. More here.

‘They were talking about basically making things up’

By Jack Dulhanty, Mollie Simpson, Molly Wilkinson and Jacob Hartley

It was late 2020, and Sacha Lord and his team at the recently renamed Primary Event Solutions were preparing a grant application to Arts Council England, requesting £480,072 from a fund designed to help culturally significant organisations survive the pandemic. The group was being helped by a funding advisor who had previously worked for Arts Council England for seven years. The advisor guided the team on what to include in the application and what to emphasise. In one document, he colour-coded tasks for each member of the team. Lord was in black. 

One former staff member of Primary Events, speaking to The Mill for the first time, remembers looking at these emails and documents, aghast. “I wasn't comfortable with this application,” he told us. “I quickly realised the grant wasn't for… wasn't for what Primary did.” 

This new source was a senior manager at the company who was there both before and after the application went in. He didn’t want to be named, but we have corroborated what he told us with people he shared his concerns with at the time. And his memory of the application process is clear: that senior staff at Primary knew they were deceiving the Arts Council. “They were talking about basically making things up,” he recalls. “Fabricating things.”

We asked Lord for his response to this new account — and the other allegations in today’s story — on Wednesday lunchtime. Yesterday afternoon we delayed publishing our story because his spokesperson told us and other media outlets that he was preparing a significant statement, originally scheduled to arrive at 6pm. Just before 8pm, we received the statement, in which Lord strongly defends his position that he has done nothing wrong while also withdrawing his threat of legal action against The Mill (you can read it in full here).

“The Mill has alleged that Primary Event Solutions Limited deliberately lied in its Culture Recovery Fund application, that I am a dishonest person, and that I have misused over £400,000 of public money,” Lord says. “These allegations are all false and I reject them completely.” Lord says our allegations “are based on a misunderstanding as to the nature of the Culture Recovery Fund as well as the nature of Primary Event Solutions Limited’s business when it made that application.”

The thrust of Lord’s argument is two-fold. The first is that the application was forward-looking, intended to “support the future activities of Primary Event Solutions Limited”, the implication being that our focus on the track record of the business before January 2021 was unfair. As Lord puts it: “For that reason, The Mill’s repeated insinuations that Primary Event Solutions Limited had historically functioned as a security company entirely miss the point.” Lord once again chooses not to answer our questions about the litany of misleading claims in the application about what the company has supposedly done in the past.

The second argument is that Primary Events was becoming a more diversified business. Diversification into areas outside security “was on the cards from at least July 2020, five months before the Arts Council application,” Lord says, pointing to emails at the time that show a desire to diversify revenue streams. “During the Covid lockdowns, I knew of many businesses pivoting to new sectors to survive,” the statement says. “This was something I actively encouraged other businesses to do and I wanted Primary Security Limited to do the same.”

Two examples are given of this diversification. One is the ‘United We Stream’ event which Lord organised in April 2020 to raise money and keep people entertained during the first Covid-19 lockdown. Lord says “Primary Event Solutions sourced the venue (‘The Met’ in Bury), reached out to and arranged artists, marketed the event and ensured that it was organised safely with social distancing.”

This is a surprising slip because Primary Event Solutions didn’t exist in April 2020 — the business was called Primary Security for another six months after the ‘United We Stream’ event. Several staff members do not recall Primary Security having any role with the event. “Why would you need security doing live streams?” one of them asks. “We never ever did anything like that.” Another tells The Mill: “No. There was nothing there that I know about.” Indeed, the press release at the time lists a series of partners in the event, none of which is Primary Security.

Interestingly, Bury Met — where Lord became a patron in 2022 — was one of the few venues or events that did confirm they worked with the company. “There were a lot of partners on this project, one of which was Primary Event Solutions — Sacha Lord/GMCA led the project,” chief executive Victoria Robinson told The Mill.

The second example that the company had diversified away from security is equally confusing, an “informal merger” that Lord now says took place between Primary Events and Ugly Duckling Payroll LLP, another one of his companies. Lord says Ugly Duckling “was engaged in a wide range of activities in the cultural sector including recruiting, placing and paying a wide range of event staff”. Primary Events took over the payroll for Ugly Duckling, he says, meaning that the company that had just changed its name from Primary Security “was able to offer — and had been offering — a wide range of services going beyond security at the time of its application.”

It’s hard to know what Lord means by this, and his spokesperson says there will be “no further comment” after last night’s statement, so we are unlikely to find out. There is no evidence in the public filings of Primary Events or Ugly Duckling that points to a merger taking place. Lord refers to an “informal merger”, which he has never mentioned to us before, but this concept has no meaning in corporate law.

Even if we accept that the “informal merger” took place, Lord says this happened in October 2020, three months before the January 2021 application was submitted. That means the “wide range of services going beyond security” the merger allowed Primary to offer could only have been for a maximum of three months, during which almost all of the country was either in a national lockdown or regional tiered restrictions.

The claims Lord still won’t answer

Lord chose not to answer our questions about the senior employee’s concerns about “fabricating” claims in the application, nor did he deny the veracity of the document sent by the company’s grant advisor. In fact, apart from the Bury Met point, the statement does not address a single substantive question we have put to Lord this week or last week.

The application, as we reported, contained a number of grossly misleading claims about the services Primary Event Solutions provided. According to invoices seen by The Mill this week, multiple staff testimonies and the company’s own website and social media pages, it had up to that point only supplied security staff. But in its application it called itself the “backbone of the creative events sector”, describing itself as a one-stop shop for event management and production. This week, we have been investigating other claims made in the Arts Council application, with a big helping hand from our readers. Time and again, the company claims to offer services provided by Lord’s other business interests — such as Warehouse Project and Parklife — but under the single banner of Primary Event Solutions. 

In a section asking about the cultural significance of Primary’s work, it says: “Every year the Parklife Foundation raises between £100k-£120k for the local community,” and claims “in Manchester alone, between WHP & Parklife we add £41,000,000 to the local economy per year,” citing GMCA data. Not only does this seemingly have nothing to do with Primary Event Solutions, but when we asked the GMCA to provide the data the application was referencing, a spokesperson said: “We do not recognise the figure of £41 million and have found no evidence that it comes from GMCA data.”

Companies were only allowed to apply to the fund once and Warehouse Project received £340,381 from the fund’s first round of grants in late 2020. And the application from Primary Events was not made as part of a parent company, because Primary was not formally part of any parent company. In the document, Primary Events promises: “This support is not on behalf of a group or other companies.”

But earlier in the process, it seems like the company’s grant advisor did think the company was going to apply as a group. He explains in the document that a parent company applying on behalf of other sub-companies should stress what it has done to support them. He then writes something that should perhaps have rung alarm bells for Primary’s managers: "This is also the point where you stress to ACE you aren’t trying to defraud it by stating you are doing only one application." Lord did not respond to our questions about this, or any other of the specific points we put to him on Wednesday.

Elsewhere in the application, Primary Events claims to have “successfully negotiated with the landlord to defer an entire year’s rent,” over the pandemic, saying this helped maintain solvency but would be due later in the year — implying they’d need the Arts Council funding if they were going to cover the cost. This negotiation was described as a “significant success”.

But Land Registry filings show that the Worsley Street address Primary worked from was part of a unit that also contained the Warehouse Project offices, and was owned by the pension fund of Ugly Duckling Properties, another of Lord’s companies. That suggests that if Primary Events was indeed paying rent — something former staff deny — then it was indirectly paying it to Lord and his business partners. When we asked Lord how negotiating the rent referral was a “significant success” if it was effectively a negotiation with himself, he did not respond.

Another curiosity of the application is its reference to supporting hundreds of emerging artists, including Stormzy, Florence and the Machine and Calvin Harris. It’s strange in a general sense — why would a security company be supporting emerging artists? But certain details stand out.

In his recent memoir Tales from The Dancefloor, Lord writes about being asked to put Harris on at Warehouse Project in 2006. That was less than a year before Harris’s debut album was released. But it was also three years before Primary Security was incorporated. By 2009, Harris couldn’t plausibly be considered an emerging talent — he was playing T in the Park, likely without the help of a Mancunian security company. Again, Lord did not respond to our question about this.

Then there’s the question of why Lord is in the process of winding up Primary Events Solutions, despite it having received more than £400,000 of public money. And why he then started a very-similar looking company called Primary Events Manchester. On a Reddit thread responding to our story this week, one person who described themselves as an employee of Primary Events Manchester didn’t seem to realise that there was a distinction between the wound-up business and the new one. When this was pointed out, the user deleted their posts.

The employee’s confusion is perhaps understandable. There is evidence of major continuity between the old company and the new one. Primary Security was based at the same address (29 Worsley Street) as the new company, and today’s website for Primary Events Manchester talks about Primary Security being incorporated in 2009. We have also been told that at least five employees at the new company are people who worked at the old one. When we called one of the company’s directors, Harry Loftman, and asked directly what services the company currently provides, he declined to tell us.

Primary Events Solutions is in the process of being wound up, owing nearly £100,000 to the government in unpaid VAT and a pandemic “bounce-back loan” that was not repaid. When we asked Lord why he was walking away from one company while setting up another doing pretty much the same thing and employing some of the same people, he did not respond.

Calls to step down

The allegations against Lord have become increasingly awkward for Andy Burnham, who appointed Lord as his nighttime economy advisor in 2018. In a meeting involving Burnham, senior GMCA officers and the leaders of Greater Manchester’s councils earlier this week, the mayor was asked about the story. Those present say he “shrugged off” the question, saying it was a matter for the Arts Council, and gave the impression that the story would likely go away. That was before the Arts Council and the GMCA reversed their position.

Since our first story was published, the two Liberal Democrat councillors on the GMCA overview and scrutiny committee have been asking questions of the GMCA. Following Wednesday’s news that the combined authority is taking a look at the claims against Lord, councillors John Leech and Shaun Ennis wrote again in a letter yesterday: “Given this decision, we believe that it is not appropriate for Mr Lord to remain in his position as an advisor during the proceeding of any investigation.” They write that the allegations should be discussed at the next scrutiny committee meeting and that Lord could return to his role if no wrongdoing is found. 

The ten Conservative group leaders across Greater Manchester have also signed a letter asking that Lord be suspended from his role, while “a full Independent GMCA and a Police investigation be undertaken into these serious allegations.”

Speaking to BBC Radio Manchester yesterday, Burnham said the allegations against Lord will "be looked at properly". But, he also asked that his advisor’s contribution to the city, and the “outstanding job” he has done, be recognised. Burnham also said there was a "sense of a bit of a campaign that's being launched" against Lord.

Correction: The original version of this article described the Primary Event Solutions offices as based in a unit “owned by Ugly Duckling Properties, another of Lord’s companies.” The Primary Event Solutions offices were in fact based in a unit owned by the pension fund of Ugly Duckling Properties, a separate entity. This was amended on 24 May 2024.

Read the our exclusive reporting from this series