SPECIAL REPORT: Fear may have been driving force in fraud

While any explanation will remain speculative, Neil Newton found that during the early 1990s Rotherham Council began to question the costs of running South Yorkshire Trading Standards Unit (SYTSU) and considered pulling out of the consortium.

That may have been a trigger for Buckley, who fearing for the future of the personal empire he had established since the unit was formed in 1986, set about trying to raise money through extra work.

When that work failed to materialise, after investing in expensive equipment, he may have found himself tempted to cook up figures to make it appear his plans had worked.

In the end, Rotherham Council remained in the consortium, but by then Buckley had begun to realise what he could get away with.

His love of metrology, the highly specialised science of weights and measures, meant he took the unit increasingly away from the mundane work required by local authorities. Instead, he focused on commercial services for clients like the aircraft industry, impressing his peers with his apparent success and leaving his employers apparently in awe of his ability.

As his confidence, or the desperation of covering up increasing debts, grew his behaviour became increasingly transparent. Reports asking for extra investment were duplicated, financial records showed a spike in high-value invoices at each year end and the number of staff Buckley said he needed to recruit to take on the extra work never materialised.

Conscious of his need to look busy, he would regularly have staff working on overtime yet he was able to fend off queries about why he had people on cleaning duties at weekends.

And Mr Newton’s report states: “A lot of DIY, and occasional grass cutting, was done on overtime.”

The lack of need for overtime was highlighted when Mr Newton untangled the workload figures. While Buckley registered a claimed 90,000 calibration tasks in one year, the real total was less than five per cent of that figure.

Yet Buckley was able to use the isolation of SYTSU, based at laboratories in Chapeltown, Sheffield, to his advantage. Visits were made only with his authorisation and he did everything possible to avoid contact with the council.

He resisted attempts to open up staff to Sheffield Council’s intranet site and sabotaged staff appraisals which would have provoked interference from his council bosses.

The language used in the Newton report to describe Mike Buckley leaves the reader in little doubt about the author’s view of the man regarded by most outsiders as a gifted scientist and dedicated public servant.

Those who knew him might struggle to reconcile their experience with Mr Newton’s assessment of a “Jekyll and Hyde” character, who was “omnipotent” and regarded as a “tyrant” by his workforce.

“The man was obsessive to the point of illness, but he was a world class metrologist as well as a world class confidence trickster,” says Mr Newton’s draft report.

“People who crossed him were isolated. I have no doubt junior members of staff I interviewed were genuinely cowed by him.”

He controlled his workforce. Staff were kept isolated doing different jobs, so no one was easily able to piece together a full picture of his activities. He pushed through re-gradings, meaning some staff earned as much as 20 per cent more than they might expect elsewhere in the council, and there was always easy overtime.

Buckley clearly had a flair for convincing those around him of his credibility, but he also displayed complacency.

“There is no doubt Mike Buckley had a standard report somewhere. Many of the phrases remain exactly the same, year after year,” states the report.