IF chief executive Pam Donnellan and monitoring officer Joy Postings had their way, you wouldn’t be reading this piece in the Echo today.

Back in January 2009, these two senior officers were informed that explicit pornographic images had been found on the council-owned laptop loaned to the then leader Cllr Stephen MacLoughlin.

Rather than refer the matter to the Standards Committee, they decided the matter could be dealt with by an internal investigation.

This was duly carried out – in complete confidence – and resulted in Cllr MacLoughlin agreeing not to breach the council’s IT policy again.

That would have been the end of the matter – but for the fact that 10 months later, news of Cllr MacLoughlin’s misdemeanors was leaked to the Echo.

We ran a front page story, which sparked a massive response from residents and councillors.

Opposition leaders Cllr Claire Smith and Anne Rey led the calls for Cllr MacLoughlin to resign, claiming he had brought the council into disrepute.

And Cllr MacLoughlin’s political future hung in the balance as he was the subject of a vote of no confidence from his Conservative colleagues. He publicly apologised on the front page of the Echo and in full council and managed to retain the support of the majority of his group.

Six official complaints were made to the Standards Committee and the council appointed an official investigator in December 2009.

Investigator Meic Sullivan-Gould, who is a solicitor by profession and has been the monitoring officer at two local councils, submitted his draft report on March 30, 2010.

But the council requested a second opinion from James Goudie QC, who came to a completely different conclu-sion. In response, Mr Sullivan-Gould added extra evidence and clarification into his report and submitted his final version to the council on May 7.

A month later, on June 24, a consider-ation and hearing sub-committee of the Standards Committee met in private and decided that there was a potential breach of the Code of Conduct and that a public hearing was necessary.

This was arranged for yesterday and, normally, the agenda and investigator’s report would be released a week in advance. But last Friday, only the agenda was released and our requests to see the background documents were refused.

In fact, even other councillors and some members of the Standards Committee were not given advance access to these reports, despite the fact that none of them was classified as exempt or confidential.