Today The Document Foundation (TDF), the organisation behind the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite, celebrates its 9th birthday.
On 17th February 2012 The Document Foundation was registered in Berlin as a German charitable foundation (Stiftung).
TDF had been created by members of the OpenOffice.org community to manage and develop LibreOffice, partially out of fears that Oracle Corporation would cease development of OpenOffice.org after its takeover of Sun Microsystems, the custodians of the OpenOffice.org project. The original OpenOffice.org project is now curated by the Apache Software Foundation.
The TDF’s goal is to produce a vendor-independent office suite with ODF support in a development environment free from control by an individual company.
This goal has been achieved too. LibreOffice is now on release version 7.1, is included as the standard office suite in many GNU/Linux distributions and been downloaded millions of times.
The City of London Police have reported that Mirwais Patang, aged 27, of Hillingdon, London, who stole the identity of a legitimate court interpreter and falsely provided court interpreting services in 140 cases was sentenced to two years imprisonment, suspended for two years, at Southwark Crown Court on 12 February 2021.
Southwark Crown Court. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Patang must also complete 300 hours of unpaid work within 24 months. He had previously pleaded guilty to 2 counts of forgery and 2 counts of fraud on 27 August 2020, plus a further 6 counts of fraud, and one count each of conspiracy to commit fraud and forgery.
Patang first acted as an interpreter of Pashto and Dari in March 2012, using his own name and identity to register with Capita, the company contracted by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) to provide court interpreting services between January 2012 and October 2016.
Patang doctored a community interpreting certificate to prove his qualification to Capita and subsequently worked on 88 cases between March 2012 and August 2016, earning £35,574.
In September 2014, Patang stole the identity of a more qualified court interpreter. By using this identity, he earned just over £30,000 working on 52 cases between September 2014 and July 2015.
His fraudulent activity was eventually uncovered when Capita alerted HM Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS) to discrepancies in timesheets Patang had submitted. This resulted in the City of London Police launching a fraud investigation.
Furthermore, evidence collected by the City of London Police showed Patang had paid his friend, Solimann David, also of Hillingdon, £1,400 to attend court on his behalf and provide translating services for eight weeks even though David also had no qualifications to act as an interpreter.
David, also aged 27, pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to commit fraud. He was also sentenced at Southwark Crown Court on 12 February 2021 to six months imprisonment, suspended for one year. He must complete 100 hours of unpaid work within 24 months.
Detective Andy Cope, from the City of London Police’s fraud team, said:
“The blind greed shown by Patang, and the total disregard for the implications of his actions and what it might mean for the integrity of serious criminal trials, is truly appalling. By thinking of only his own financial gain, he has undermined confidence in the criminal justice system and put victims of crime through unfair stress and worry.”
On a rare excursion into town, I happened to notice that Castlemead, the city’s tallest office block, is currently undergoing a refurbishment and is surrounded by site hoardings which have the usual aspirational developer’s blurb splashed across it, as can be seen below.
General view of the Castlemead site on Lower Castle Street
Besides being the new benchmark, the refurbisher’s website describes Castlemead as follows:
Castlemead is a city landmark office building and offers high quality refurbished open plan accommodation from 3,450 – 11,128 sq ft and the UK’s First Platinum Plus 100 Cyclingscore Accredited facilities.
With 360 panoramic views over Bristol’s cityscape and Castlepark [sic] and with the Cabot Circus regional shopping, dining and leisure destination on your doorstep, why locate your business anywhere else?
Nevertheless, a quick glance at the images chosen to illustrate this landmark office building’s quality reveals one glaringly obvious fact.
This quality is only available to white people. All the figures shown are invariably Caucasian. There’s not a BAME face to be seen anywhere either on the site’s hoardings or in the CGIs used on the dedicated website.
Spot the BAME face 1Spot the BAME face 2
According to the city council’s website, 16% of the city’s population of 463,400 persons belongs to a black or minority ethnic group. That’s over 74,000 people.
When will developers realise and start to portray a more accurate picture of our city in their very expensive fantasy doodlings?
After all, this is not the first time the absence of non-white faces from new Bristol property developments has been pointed out. It is a phenomenon that was first highlighted back in 2009 by a fellow local blogger.
One would have expected the city’s major property moguls to have learned something by now and made a start on accurately portraying all the kinds of people in the city who will ultimately be occupying their benchmark and landmark buildings.
Today The Document Foundation (TDF), the organisation behind the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite, celebrates its 9th birthday.
