Sacha Lord has withdrawn his legal threat against The Mill

By Jack Dulhanty, Mollie Simpson, Molly Wilkinson and Jacob Hartley

It was late 2020, and Sacha Lord and his team at the recently renamed Primary Event Solutions were preparing a grant application to Arts Council England, requesting £480,072 from a fund designed to help culturally significant organisations survive the pandemic. The group was being helped by a funding advisor who had previously worked for Arts Council England for seven years. The advisor guided the team on what to include in the application and what to emphasise. In one document, he colour-coded tasks for each member of the team. Lord was in black. 

One former staff member of Primary Events, speaking to The Mill for the first time, remembers looking at these emails and documents, aghast. “I wasn’t comfortable with this application,” he told us. “I quickly realised the grant wasn’t for… wasn’t for what Primary did.” 

This new source was a senior manager at the company who was there both before and after the application went in. He didn’t want to be named, but we have corroborated what he told us with people he shared his concerns with at the time. And his memory of the application process is clear: that senior staff at Primary knew they were deceiving the Arts Council. “They were talking about basically making things up,” he recalls. “Fabricating things.”

We asked Lord for his response to this new account — and the other allegations in today’s story — on Wednesday lunchtime. Yesterday afternoon we delayed publishing our story because his spokesperson told us and other media outlets that he was preparing a significant statement, originally scheduled to arrive at 6pm. Just before 8pm, we received the statement, in which Lord strongly defends his position that he has done nothing wrong while also withdrawing his threat of legal action against The Mill (you can read it in full here).

“The Mill has alleged that Primary Event Solutions Limited deliberately lied in its Culture Recovery Fund application, that I am a dishonest person, and that I have misused over £400,000 of public money,” Lord says. “These allegations are all false and I reject them completely.” Lord says our allegations “are based on a misunderstanding as to the nature of the Culture Recovery Fund as well as the nature of Primary Event Solutions Limited’s business when it made that application.”

The thrust of Lord’s argument is two-fold. The first is that the application was forward-looking, intended to “support the future activities of Primary Event Solutions Limited”, the implication being that our focus on the track record of the business before January 2021 was unfair. As Lord puts it: “For that reason, The Mill’s repeated insinuations that Primary Event Solutions Limited had historically functioned as a security company entirely miss the point.” Lord once again chooses not to answer our questions about the litany of misleading claims in the application about what the company has supposedly done in the past.

The second argument is that Primary Events was becoming a more diversified business. Diversification into areas outside security “was on the cards from at least July 2020, five months before the Arts Council application,” Lord says, pointing to emails at the time that show a desire to diversify revenue streams. “During the Covid lockdowns, I knew of many businesses pivoting to new sectors to survive,” the statement says. “This was something I actively encouraged other businesses to do and I wanted Primary Security Limited to do the same.”

Two examples are given of this diversification. One is the ‘United We Stream’ event which Lord organised in April 2020 to raise money and keep people entertained during the first Covid-19 lockdown. Lord says “Primary Event Solutions sourced the venue (‘The Met’ in Bury), reached out to and arranged artists, marketed the event and ensured that it was organised safely with social distancing.”

This is a surprising slip because Primary Event Solutions didn’t exist in April 2020 — the business was called Primary Security for another six months after the ‘United We Stream’ event. Several staff members do not recall Primary Security having any role with the event. “Why would you need security doing live streams?” one of them asks. “We never ever did anything like that.” Another tells The Mill: “No. There was nothing there that I know about.” Indeed, the press release at the time lists a series of partners in the event, none of which is Primary Security.

Interestingly, Bury Met — where Lord became a patron in 2022 — was one of the few venues or events that did confirm they worked with the company. “There were a lot of partners on this project, one of which was Primary Event Solutions — Sacha Lord/GMCA led the project,” chief executive Victoria Robinson told The Mill.

The second example that the company had diversified away from security is equally confusing, an “informal merger” that Lord now says took place between Primary Events and Ugly Duckling Payroll LLP, another one of his companies. Lord says Ugly Duckling “was engaged in a wide range of activities in the cultural sector including recruiting, placing and paying a wide range of event staff”. Primary Events took over the payroll for Ugly Duckling, he says, meaning that the company that had just changed its name from Primary Security “was able to offer — and had been offering — a wide range of services going beyond security at the time of its application.”

It’s hard to know what Lord means by this, and his spokesperson says there will be “no further comment” after last night’s statement, so we are unlikely to find out. There is no evidence in the public filings of Primary Events or Ugly Duckling that points to a merger taking place. Lord refers to an “informal merger”, which he has never mentioned to us before, but this concept has no meaning in corporate law.

Even if we accept that the “informal merger” took place, Lord says this happened in October 2020, three months before the January 2021 application was submitted. That means the “wide range of services going beyond security” the merger allowed Primary to offer could only have been for a maximum of three months, during which almost all of the country was either in a national lockdown or regional tiered restrictions.

The claims Lord still won’t answer

Lord chose not to answer our questions about the senior employee’s concerns about “fabricating” claims in the application, nor did he deny the veracity of the document sent by the company’s grant advisor. In fact, apart from the Bury Met point, the statement does not address a single substantive question we have put to Lord this week or last week.

The application, as we reported, contained a number of grossly misleading claims about the services Primary Event Solutions provided. According to invoices seen by The Mill this week, multiple staff testimonies and the company’s own website and social media pages, it had up to that point only supplied security staff. But in its application it called itself the “backbone of the creative events sector”, describing itself as a one-stop shop for event management and production.

This week, we have been investigating other claims made in the Arts Council application, with a big helping hand from our readers. Time and again, the company claims to offer services provided by Lord’s other business interests — such as Warehouse Project and Parklife — but under the single banner of Primary Event Solutions. 

In a section asking about the cultural significance of Primary’s work, it says: “Every year the Parklife Foundation raises between £100k-£120k for the local community,” and claims “in Manchester alone, between WHP & Parklife we add £41,000,000 to the local economy per year,” citing GMCA data. Not only does this seemingly have nothing to do with Primary Event Solutions, but when we asked the GMCA to provide the data the application was referencing, a spokesperson said: “We do not recognise the figure of £41 million and have found no evidence that it comes from GMCA data.”

Companies were only allowed to apply to the fund once and Warehouse Project received £340,381 from the fund’s first round of grants in late 2020. And the application from Primary Events was not made as part of a parent company, because Primary was not formally part of any parent company. In the document, Primary Events promises: “This support is not on behalf of a group or other companies.”

But earlier in the process, it seems like the company’s grant advisor did think the company was going to apply as a group. He explains in the document that a parent company applying on behalf of other sub-companies should stress what it has done to support them. He then writes something that should perhaps have rung alarm bells for Primary’s managers: “This is also the point where you stress to ACE you aren’t trying to defraud it by stating you are doing only one application.” Lord did not respond to our questions about this, or any other of the specific points we put to him on Wednesday.

Elsewhere in the application, Primary Events claims to have “successfully negotiated with the landlord to defer an entire year’s rent,” over the pandemic, saying this helped maintain solvency but would be due later in the year — implying they’d need the Arts Council funding if they were going to cover the cost. This negotiation was described as a “significant success”.

But Land Registry filings show that the Worsley Street address Primary worked from was part of a unit that also contained the Warehouse Project offices, and was owned by the pension fund of Ugly Duckling Properties, another of Lord’s companies. That suggests that if Primary Events was indeed paying rent — something former staff deny — then it was indirectly paying it to Lord and his business partners. When we asked Lord how negotiating the rent referral was a “significant success” if it was effectively a negotiation with himself, he did not respond.

Another curiosity of the application is its reference to supporting hundreds of emerging artists, including Stormzy, Florence and the Machine and Calvin Harris. It’s strange in a general sense — why would a security company be supporting emerging artists? But certain details stand out.

In his recent memoir Tales from The Dancefloor, Lord writes about being asked to put Harris on at Warehouse Project in 2006. That was less than a year before Harris’s debut album was released. But it was also three years before Primary Security was incorporated. By 2009, Harris couldn’t plausibly be considered an emerging talent — he was playing T in the Park, likely without the help of a Mancunian security company. Again, Lord did not respond to our question about this.

Then there’s the question of why Lord is in the process of winding up Primary Events Solutions, despite it having received more than £400,000 of public money. And why he then started a very-similar looking company called Primary Events Manchester. On a Reddit thread responding to our story this week, one person who described themselves as an employee of Primary Events Manchester didn’t seem to realise that there was a distinction between the wound-up business and the new one. When this was pointed out, the user deleted their posts.

The employee’s confusion is perhaps understandable. There is evidence of major continuity between the old company and the new one. Primary Security was based at the same address (29 Worsley Street) as the new company, and today’s website for Primary Events Manchester talks about Primary Security being incorporated in 2009. We have also been told that at least five employees at the new company are people who worked at the old one. When we called one of the company’s directors, Harry Loftman, and asked directly what services the company currently provides, he declined to tell us.

Primary Events Solutions is in the process of being wound up, owing nearly £100,000 to the government in unpaid VAT and a pandemic “bounce-back loan” that was not repaid. When we asked Lord why he was walking away from one company while setting up another doing pretty much the same thing and employing some of the same people, he did not respond.

Calls to step down

The allegations against Lord have become increasingly awkward for Andy Burnham, who appointed Lord as his nighttime economy advisor in 2018. In a meeting involving Burnham, senior GMCA officers and the leaders of Greater Manchester’s councils earlier this week, the mayor was asked about the story. Those present say he “shrugged off” the question, saying it was a matter for the Arts Council, and gave the impression that the story would likely go away. That was before the Arts Council and the GMCA reversed their position.

Since our first story was published, the two Liberal Democrat councillors on the GMCA overview and scrutiny committee have been asking questions of the GMCA. Following Wednesday’s news that the combined authority is taking a look at the claims against Lord, councillors John Leech and Shaun Ennis wrote again in a letter yesterday: “Given this decision, we believe that it is not appropriate for Mr Lord to remain in his position as an advisor during the proceeding of any investigation.” They write that the allegations should be discussed at the next scrutiny committee meeting and that Lord could return to his role if no wrongdoing is found. 

The ten Conservative group leaders across Greater Manchester have also signed a letter asking that Lord be suspended from his role, while “a full Independent GMCA and a Police investigation be undertaken into these serious allegations.”

Speaking to BBC Radio Manchester yesterday, Burnham said the allegations against Lord will “be looked at properly”. But, he also asked that his advisor’s contribution to the city, and the “outstanding job” he has done, be recognised. Burnham also said there was a “sense of a bit of a campaign that’s being launched” against Lord.

Correction: The original version of this article described the Primary Event Solutions offices as based in a unit “owned by Ugly Duckling Properties, another of Lord’s companies.” The Primary Event Solutions offices were in fact based in a unit owned by the pension fund of Ugly Duckling Properties, a separate entity. This was amended on 24 May 2024.

Read the our exclusive reporting from this series

Exclusive: Did Sacha Lord cheat his way to £400,000 of public money during the pandemic?

Dear Millers — today’s story raises serious questions about Sacha Lord, one of Greater Manchester’s most prominent business figures and a close advisor to Andy Burnham. The Mill has obtained evidence that a security company controlled by Lord repeatedly lied in an application for Covid-19 support. As a result of the misleading application, the company then received over £400,000 of taxpayers’ money at the height of the pandemic.

The MillJack Dulhanty

Why isn’t Andy Burnham’s GMCA answering questions about Sacha Lord?

By Joshi Herrmann Andy Burnham and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority are refusing to answer questions about their response to serious allegations about the mayor’s nighttime economy advisor Sacha Lord, as new details emerge about the story. Lord’s lawyers threatened The Mill with a lawsuit yesterday, and the Manchester Evening News has declined to comment on why it didn’t investigate a tip off it was given about the story in late 2022.

The MillThe Mill

‘It was solely a security company. I couldn’t be surer’

Dear Millers — today’s been unlike any day since we started The Mill. Since we published Joshi’s editor’s note this morning, we’ve had an avalanche of emails and messages about the Sacha Lord story, far more than we’ve been able to read so far. It’s been a truly extraordinary response to our call for a “community fact-check” to dig deeper into how Lord’s company Primary Events managed to secure more than £400,000 of taxpayers’ money during the pandemic. Huge thanks to everyone who has been in touch so far with tips, ideas, screenshots and documents — it’s inspiring to see how a community of readers can come together in a moment like this.

The MillThe Mill

A big twist in the Sacha Lord story: Arts Council and GMCA now investigating

Dear Millers — we hear there is some sort of election news going on, but you won’t read about that in this edition because there have been two big developments in the Sacha Lord story in the past few hours. The first is that the Arts Council has changed its position on this story and has begun an investigation into the claims we’ve reported about Lord’s company Primary Events. A spokesperson told us this afternoon that the new probe was “in light of new information that has been directly brought to our attention this week”. It’s a major step forward.

The MillJoshi Herrmann