While the Flood tribunal continues its work, Rachel Donnelly reports on a planning scandal in the north-eastern British city of Doncaster which ended with the jailing of the principals
Like all the best corruption scandals, it had its own name: "Donnygate."
It was a tale of local government sleaze that stretched back to 1993 and right to the top of the Labour-dominated Doncaster Council, with bribery, fraud and expensive houses just a few of the perks of a culture of dishonesty.
At one stage, 73 people with links to the local authority were arrested, 41 of them serving or former council members, and eventually 30 people were convicted of a range of offences linked to the council's finances.
The climax of a meticulous five-year police investigation came at Nottingham Crown Court last week when three people, one of them a former Labour chairman of planning at the council, were imprisoned for their part in a multi-million-pound housing development scandal.
In 1993 planning permission was secured for residential use on land at Branton, near Doncaster, against the advice of the council's planning officials who had earmarked the site for environmental use as part of a long-term planning scheme unveiled four years earlier.
But in a complete turnaround of council policy, senior councillors insisted the large residential development should go ahead, boosting the number of homes being built in the borough between 1986 and 2001 from 14,600 to 20,000.
Once planning permission went through, the owners of the land, including property developer, Alan Hughes, who was sentenced to five years for bribing councillors to support the housing development, made £2.25 million on the sale of the site.
South Yorkshire Police launched "Operation Danum" in 1997 after the local newspaper, the Yorkshire Post, and a few whistleblowers inside and outside the council began questioning the council's finances and planning decisions, in particular the Branton site.
In an investigation which led to more than 2,000 allegations against the council, police uncovered the desperate lengths that Hughes went to in order to save his debt-ridden business and the "crudely designed" fabrications that he and Mr Peter Birks, the council's chairman of planning, established to hide their corruption.
"The payments ran to many thousands of pounds," Mr David Farrer QC told the Nottingham court, referring to Hughes's payments to Labour councillors.
In the case of Mr Birks, who had helped push through planning permission for the Branton site in 1993, Hughes gave him a £160,000 farmhouse.
To disguise the "corrupt gift" as a straightforward sale, Birks and his partner, Ms Stephanie Higginson, who was convicted of aiding and abetting corruption, made a false record of mortgage payments to Birks in a small black book found by police during a search of the farmhouse.
The former Labour deputy leader of the council, Ray Stockhill, was also on Hughes's payroll.
He was given a two-year suspended sentence for receiving payments of more than £30,000 in connection with approving the planning permission, and Stockhill's financial adviser, Gordon Armitage, was convicted of aiding and abetting corruption and sentenced to a year in prison.
Many believe Doncaster's problem was that between 1981 and 1996 important decisions were taken not by the entire ruling Labour group but by an unofficial coterie, the Mining Community Group, who assumed power in the council chamber through influence and favouritism.
They shared out key jobs between them, and among their members were nearly all the senior councillors who were later involved in the planning corruption.
The Labour Party, accused by some of ignoring initial warnings about allegations of wrongdoing in Doncaster, has now implemented tougher vetting procedures for approving election candidates.