Controversy over who is behind the Conference of Black Mayors was stirred up following the election of Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson as president of a different organisation, the National Conference of Black Mayors (NCBM), in May 2013.

Mr Johnson discovered that the NCBM was massively in debt and immediately ordered an internal audit into the finances of the 40-year-old, Atlanta-based group. Chief executive officer Vanessa Williams refused to cooperate with that audit and was eventually sued by Mr Johnson, who issued a writ ordering that she hand over NCBM accounts. Ms Williams was sacked by the NCBM in September after it was discovered she had spent $600,000 of NCBM funds on personal expenses, and she retaliated by filing a counter claim, charging that Mr Johnson’s election as president was invalid.

In March of this year a Fulton County Superior Court judge ruled that Mr Johnson’s election was legitimate, and that any decisions he made should be upheld.

Georgia state records show that, just before Mr Johnson’s election, Ms Williams set up a new organisation called the Conference of Black Mayors Inc (CBM).

According to the Georgia Secretary of State website, in April 2013 Ms Williams incorporated the non-profit organisation “for charitable and educational purposes”. She also listed herself as president, CFO and CEO and stated that CBM “is not a membership organisation”.

Ms Williams has maintained that the CBM is not an offshoot or splinter group of the NCBM, but is in fact the same organisation. Her supporters have insisted that the NCBM voted to change its name in 2011 to reflect its increasingly global membership, which is why CBM was created.

But lawyers for the NCBM have warned that the CBM has no connection with the original organisation.

“It appears that Ms Williams has represented to others that she still represents the NCBM, and may have misrepresented her authority in order to gain credibility with third parties such as yourself,” attorney BJay Pak said in an e-mail to Corporation councillor Larry Scott earlier this year.

“There is no record of any entity that we are aware of, that goes by the letters CBM. A search of the Georgia Secretary of State’s Corporation Registration site shows that Ms Williams registered a “The Conference For Black Mayor’s, Inc.” on April 17, 2013, with her as the registered agent and the officer. NCBM’s Board never authorised her to create an entity so similarly named. This appears to be an entity that was created for the purpose of misleading third parties. Again, other than what is reported in the Ga Secretary of State’s records, we have no record of CBM, and there is no other officers or agent listed except for Ms Williams. NCBM is not affiliated with CBM, and it appears that CBM’s agents is misrepresenting, their affiliation with NCBM. This year marks the 40th anniversary of NCBM, and not any entity called CBM.”

Informed of these concerns last month, Mayor Graeme Outerbridge told The Royal Gazette: “We’re going to have a special meeting where everyone can sit down and share all the information we have,” Mr Outerbridge said. “We need to find out about name changes and membership. We have not got to a final decision on what we’re going to do because we need to go over all the information. Basically we need to find out more information about who we’re dealing with and what exactly is going on.”

Asked yesterday what investigations the municipality had conducted to ensure that the CBM was a legitimate organisation, Mr Outerbridge said: “Without going into exact detail some of the issues from the Georgia judgement [see separate story] had to be addressed and we got the information from the CBM and we were comfortable in understanding what exactly we were dealing with and we’ve decided based on that information we could go ahead, we were comfortable to go to the Minister with that information and share it. We were happy with everything we looked at.

“We went through things very carefully with the Minister and provided the information directly from the CBM to the Minister and had discussions for clarification — why the name confusion, things like that, because the NCBM basically a while ago had decided it was ... becoming an international organisation, not just a national organisation.”

Asked if he had approached the NCBM, the Mayor replied: “From the point of view of being a split organisation it’s actually an organisation of both bodies.”

Deputy Mayor Donal Smith added: “In 2011 the NCBM passed a resolution that they will relinquish the name ‘National’ and pick up ‘Conference of Black Mayors’. There’s no confusion over the NCBM and CBM, none at all. The NCBM is now in the hands of the president of the CBM.

And Minister Fahy also said he was confident that the CBM had not acted improperly.

“It would be absurd to perpetrate some massive fraud for what really amounts to about $100,000. I find that absurd,” he said.

But Mayor Outerbridge also admitted that the Corporation has never approached Mr Pak or anyone else from president Johnson’s camp, claiming that Mr Pak never approached him.