A counter complaint from Deputy Parkinson about Deputy Helyar was dismissed by the Code of Conduct panel.
Last night Deputy Parkinson confirmed that he had not yet accepted the cautions. If he does not, the report could be placed before the States for a resolution.
Earlier this month he apologised on Twitter for the comments made.
‘I got the report on Sunday, I read it, found it quite surprising, and I’m thinking about it,’ he said yesterday. ‘I will decide how to respond in due course.’
The first complaint upheld was that in a Facebook post, Deputy Parkinson used a phrase to describe Deputy Helyar’s politics which was a slur and inaccurate. The panel said the words used were ‘unacceptable’.
Deputy Helyar denied the allegation made against him and said the accusation, which was not repeated by the panel in its report, went ‘far beyond the usual exchange of views between politicians’.
Deputy Parkinson said the words needed to be assessed in context.
The panel also agreed with complaints that Deputy Parkinson had misrepresented Deputy Helyar’s comments made in a debate on discrimination.
But related allegations of negative comments about Citizens Advice Guernsey, and Deputy Helyar’s chairmanship of it, were not upheld.
It also rejected a complaint about another reference to Deputy Helyar on social media – the same issue over which Deputy Parkinson’s complaint about Deputy Helyar’s comments, which he alleged were defamatory, was also dismissed.
While the panel did uphold the complaint that Deputy Parkinson had failed to list his trusteeship of the charity Liberate – a post from which he has since resigned – in his public declaration of interests, it said it was ‘sufficiently minor’ that a sanction was not required.
The cautions are the lowest level of sanction the panel can impose. The panel, which consisted of the Rev. John Guille, Dame Mary Perkins, and Stephen Trevor, said Deputy Parkinson had breached several provisions of the code. But it regarded each breach as being ‘relatively minor’.
The complaints were made by Deputy Helyar, Kate Miller-Helyar, and David Piesing, all involved with the Guernsey Party.
