DESTROYED IN COURT
0411 TRIBUNAL: ETHIOPIA
[This was one, less important, part of my submission to the Tribunal]
In 1989 I personally obtained the contract for, and set up, the Business School’s most prestigious project, jointly with the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) and funded by the Overseas Development Agency (ODA); with a £500,000 budget. The main group of students, who were all members of government there, included the President (Meles Zenawi), the Prime Minister (Tamrat Layne) and the Minister of Defence (Seeye Abraha). Accordingly, although it had to be kept top secret, it was the most prestigious project undertaken by any UK business school at that time. It incidentally made me the one of the most powerful academics in OUBS, and this attracted the attention of those who were seeking to increase their political power in the school.
11. At that time the three individuals mentioned above made up the military junta which was running Ethiopia, with its 60 million people, after the successful conclusion of the (17 years long) military campaign which ended the civil war against the previous dictator (Mengistu). We taught the standard MBA at a distance, as usual, but also complemented this by a significant amount of face-to-face teaching. The latter aspect was exceptional for the OU and was the reason why the VC quite reasonably decided, in the first instance, that it was not suitable for the OU; though he was, in the national interest, later persuaded to change his mind.
12. I alone managed the project for the first 4 years. The individual courses were staffed, in Addis Abeba, by extended visits from the most senior OUBS academics who were then chairing these courses. Even so, I also undertook around half the teaching on the ground; across the whole range of MBA electives. It was widely recognised (by the FCO as well as the Ethiopian Council of Ministers) that the programme was a great success and it reportedly contributed significantly to the OUBS later receiving the Queen’s Award for Export achievement; as well as ultimately contributing more £1 million to OUBS income.
Despite my achievements in producing highly rated courses and my internationally recognized research, but especially my unique achievements in Ethiopia which were sufficient for me to be appointed by the President as his personal adviser, Roland Kaye was later to write that “It is reasonable to say that his behaviour has been unacceptable for many years.” More specifically, he fully supported the subsequent libel issued by Mark Tulitt which said, amongst a number of such libels, that “…you will not effectively handle an influential level job with people management or commercial management responsibility, just as you have not done so to date after all this time”. Indeed, the Dean went further to imply that my academic standing was also inadequate. The bitterness revealed in these views lay at the heart of his treatment of me.
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