Jeannie Cameron said that the claims, made by fellow States member Alex Snowdon, were ‘tedious and soul-destroying’, and she urged him to accept that he had been sanctioned for misconduct and not for opposing investigations into building a data centre on the island.
Alderney’s commissioner for standards, Dr Melissa McCullough, has recently upheld numerous code of conduct complaints against Mr Snowdon, leading to bans first from States meetings and then from committee meetings as well.
Mr Snowdon has since accused the standards commissioner of taking sides and his colleagues of using the code of conduct process to stymie his opposition to the data centre idea.
‘The issue of why Alex had an original code of conduct complaint was not due to the data centre per se, but due to disclosing confidential information to the public from the Economic Development and Policy & Finance,’ said Jeannie Cameron, who chairs the latter committee.
‘The inability of the States of Alderney to keep matters marked confidential by the civil service for commercial reasons, and on advice of Guernsey Procurement, and their release widely into the public domain, is what is causing the issue of investors of any kind not wanting to do business with the States of Alderney.’
Ms Cameron said she and many of her colleagues were fed up with baseless insinuations being made about bias and corruption.
She was also concerned that from the outside it might look like Alderney was debilitated by political divisions and insisted the reality was completely different.
‘The States is not divided. It is very aligned on almost everything and certainly on this issue, and every step of what we have done is correct, minuted and able to be scrutinised,’ she said.
‘I am sure the commissioner for standards has looked at this evidence as part of her deliberations.
‘The majority of us are not there as career politicians to play political games. We are there to do the best job we can for Alderney and in so doing we have followed civil service advice every step of the way.’
Ms Cameron has repeatedly said that no States member was pushing unreasonably for a data centre to be built and instead the possibility was merely being explored.
She stressed that any such project would be subject to full public consultation if progressed, although that would still be some way off. She said that Mr Snowdon’s claims that a data centre could be pushed through during his suspension were ‘outrageous’.
‘Without there even being a proposal before us, how is that possible? It is purely political theatre. Not one States member is pushing a data centre. We are going through the required processes to consider all opportunities fairly on merit.’