The secret source who helped me crack a council scandal

The email that landed in my inbox at 10pm one Friday night was odd to say the least.

All it contained was a link to an article on an old Twitter rant of mine about the state of UK courts, alongside a short statement: “This hasn’t changed much.”

But it was the identity of the sender that really surprised me. This was someone at the heart of my latest investigation – who I’d never previously spoken to.

It didn’t initially lead anywhere: we exchanged a couple of innocuous emails about the justice system before the conversation went cold. But it set in motion events that would blow my story wide open.

This was back in January 2020. A few months earlier, I’d started looking into some suspicious financial data coming out of Thurrock council. According to an obscure government dataset, Thurrock appeared to have borrowed £1bn from other local authorities. Yet the council had said very little about what it was doing with the money.

There was, however, one indication. Councils have to declare every time they spend over £500. They do this in spreadsheets very few people look at. My analysis of this data revealed payments worth £74m connected to a company called Rockfire Capital, which it transpired was using the money to buy solar farms (Thurrock would eventually pour £655m into these investments).

Further digging threw up red flags about this business model – including the level of debt, the scale of the investments and the risk-to-reward ratio. But to fully understand the gamble being taken with vast sums of public money, I needed to speak to someone on the inside. Which was where my mysterious emailer came in.

There’s a lot more to say about what happened next but I need to be deliberately vague in order to protect that person as a source. They took a big risk in speaking to me. Liam Kavanagh, Rockfire’s founder, is an aggressive litigant. (In fact, he took another one of my sources to court and we helped them navigate the process.)

There were times when my emailer was understandably reluctant to speak, but they also knew what was at stake. They could see how much money the taxpayer could lose. They also knew how much it had been used to buy Kavanagh a luxury yacht, private jet, fleet of supercars and the world’s most expensive rotating bed (£250,000 if you’re interested). Crucially, they could help prove all of this.

It’s no exaggeration to say it took years to build the level of trust I needed. There were times when we would exchange 50 messages a day, when I heard from them more than I did my friends and family. My phone would go off at weekends and my partner would joke that I spoke more to them than I did to her.

They became, well, “friend” isn’t quite the right word. Or maybe it is. Certainly, they were more than just someone I was speaking to for a story. That comes with its challenges. Being contactable at basically any time is essential to fostering trust. But it’s also exhausting, especially when an investigation takes years. There’s also the question of boundaries – where and how to draw a line – because impartiality is key. Building that long-term relationship while maintaining your integrity as a journalist is tricky.

Their welfare came first at all times, even if it slowed our work or limited what we could say. And not everyone was as careful as us. I once had to contact a national media partner at 1am to make sure they didn’t publish a certain piece of identifying information. There were moments when it looked like they would back out altogether, unsure about the point of it all. After all, they’d raised the alarm with the authorities multiple times and got nowhere – what difference could journalism make?

Quite a bit, as it happened. When in July 2022 we published a story revealing major holes in the council's investments, its business model collapsed. A month or so later, Thurrock’s council leader and chief executive were sacked and government commissioners were appointed. Thurrock was declared effectively bankrupt. It still hasn’t recovered.

The information I’d been given by my source was vital to uncovering this scandal, when everyone else – the council, the company, the government – had either turned a blind eye or made out that there was nothing to see.

Sources are the backbone of all of our reporting. They help us confirm suspicions and turn rumour into credible, publishable fact. It’s thanks to my sources that the years I spent digging into Thurrock’s investments have led to a formal investigation by the Serious Fraud Office and has prompted a high court legal dispute.

When Kavanagh filed his defence to the high court – finally admitting that he pocketed vast sums of taxpayers’ money – the first people I contacted were my sources, including the sender of that mysterious email. None of this would have come out were it not for their help.