In this week's episode, Mollie and Jack look back on the last two years of reporting on Sacha Lord.

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16 months, 12 stories — the Sacha Lord Saga in full

15/07/2023: Part one of our profile of Sacha Lord, delving into the childhood, personal life and success of the nightlife impresario.

19/07/2023: Part two looked at the conflict of interest created by Lord being a nightlife boss as well as an advisor to the mayor.

16/05/2024: Mark Turnbull said he could prove Lord had cheated his way to over £400k by telling the Arts Council a regional security company was in fact the “backbone of the national creative events sector”.

18/05/2024: Lawyers representing Lord threatened legal action unless we took our story down.

20/05/2024: Lord continued to threaten legal action.

20/05/2024: We found further evidence that the application was misleading.

22/05/2024: The Arts Council announced a review of Primary Event Solution’s application, and the GMCA announced a fact-finding mission.

24/05/2024: Lord withdrew his legal threat.

14/06/2024: We found the assessor of the application was Karen Boardman, who sits on other nightlife committees with Andy Burnham.

28/09/2024: We requested the original assessment document of Primary’s application, and found that the Arts Council had taken the most easily falsifiable claims at face value. 

29/01/2025: The Arts Council withdrew the grant and began proceedings to recover the £401,928, and Lord resigned.

31/01/2025: We dug into the questions left behind.

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