The Casablanca Deal: Secret contracts and unexplained payments at the University of Greater Manchester

Editor’s note: Today’s story is the latest in our investigation into the University of Greater Manchester. Because it contains allegations of possible corruption involving senior figures at the university, we handed the details of what we are reporting to Greater Manchester Police on Monday evening. If you know anything that could help us, please get in touch.

On Saturday, February 8, two days before he lost his powerful role at the University of Greater Manchester, Joseph Wheeler sent a series of WhatsApp messages to a colleague. Perhaps he sensed his “kingdom was falling”, as one person later put it, but whatever the reason for the urgency, Wheeler wanted to get paid. And he didn’t want to be paid directly.

“Can a Dubai account be set up please asap and credit in,” the first message said.

His colleague pointed out that would only be possible if Wheeler went to Dubai to create an account in person.

Two minutes later, Wheeler had come up with a Plan B: he wanted the money — said to be £56,000 — to be paid to his son’s bank account. He shared the name, sort code and account number.

“Let me know when done ta,” Wheeler wrote.

Why would a senior manager at a university – a man in charge of marketing, recruitment, admissions and HR, among other things – be asking for £56,000 to be made to a bank account in Dubai, or transferred to his son? We’ve been trying to work that out since we heard about the request last week.

Doing so has led us to allegations that are much more serious than anything we’ve reported about the university in recent weeks. We’ve obtained contracts, emails and other files which show that Wheeler and another senior staff member at the university recently set up a deal with a company in Casablanca, Morocco that was set to funnel large sums from one of the university’s biggest commercial partners into Wheeler’s private company. That deal looks like an arrangement for kickbacks – a form of illicit payment in return for something – to be paid to Wheeler’s firm, and the circumstances in which it was signed suggest bribery laws may have been broken.

On Monday night, we passed the claims made in this story to Greater Manchester Police, who said they are “liaising with our fraud team as to next steps”. Local MP Phil Brickell has told us he is writing to the Secretary of State for Education to ask for a meeting following our reporting. “These accusations are incredibly serious, and should be thoroughly investigated,” Brickell told us. “As someone who worked in compliance for a number of years, it is clear to me that this deal should have raised a number of obvious red flags.”

A spokesperson for the University of Greater Manchester did not deny any of the allegations in our story, but said it has launched an investigation. “The allegations that we have been made aware of are extremely serious and, as a result, the Vice Chancellor has invoked the University’s internal procedures to ensure they are dealt with appropriately.”

We’ve seen evidence that a similar side-deal with a different student recruitment partner was reported to the university’s vice chancellor George Holmes three years ago and that he seemingly did not take action against Wheeler or end his relationship with the university. Taken together, the allegations raise grave questions about the possibility of financial corruption at a public university that receives millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money, questions the university and Wheeler are currently choosing not to answer.

We sent more than 20 questions to both parties on Monday and neither has chosen to reply to any of them specifically. RSM has not replied at all, and the university says that its internal process means “we are unable to comment further until it has concluded.”

The Casablanca deal

The deal with the company in Casablanca was agreed at the Lowry Hotel late last year. The meeting began at 5.30pm with Joseph Wheeler ordering a gin and tonic and ended with an arrangement that promised to earn his company hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Wheeler was then one of the most senior figures at the University of Greater Manchester, and alongside him was another: Paul Starkey, the university’s executive director of strategy, brand and “future students”. The organisation they worked for was still then called Bolton University, and Wheeler and Starkey were pivotal figures in its attempt to rebrand and increase its access to a lucrative international market. Starkey was a full time employee of the university who reported to Wheeler and according to insiders, worked hand in hand with him. 

But there was something strange about the negotiation at the Lowry Hotel: the two men didn’t seem to be there to represent the university. Instead, the deal being hammered out would require ECN, a student recruitment company based in Casablanca, to pay a huge chunk of its profits not to the university but to RSM, a company owned by Wheeler, in return for RSM performing a short list of vaguely defined “marketing services”.

RSM, you may remember from our recent reporting, has been paid £8 million by the university over the past six financial years, apparently for handling the university’s marketing, social media and other functions. The cash coming from ECN to RSM under this new arrangement would be separate from – and additional to – that impressive revenue stream that RSM was already receiving from the university.

Sitting opposite Wheeler and Starkey was an executive from ECN, who had flown over from Morocco for this negotiation. He now found himself in an invidious position. His company had become a major source of students for the university, handling the recruitment and admissions for hundreds of applicants per year, most of them coming from Nigeria.

ECN’s 20-strong office in Casablanca had become known in the university as the “Africa Branch Office” and the students it attracted and processed brought in a significant proportion of the university’s international tuition fees. But the ECN executive knew that because of the positions they occupied within the university, Wheeler and Starkey were in a position to end that partnership. If he didn’t agree to pay Wheeler’s company RSM what they were asking for, his family could lose its business with the university entirely.

The executive from ECN “looked really nervous,” says a more junior university employee who was also at the meeting. “Like someone who was fighting for his life.”