Controversial Dunedin city councillor Benedict Ong has been told commentary from him on social media is defamatory and he should remove it.<\/p>\n
Dunedin City Council acting chief executive Scott MacLean said allegations by him were “totally rejected, defamatory and should be removed”.<\/p>\n
“Please take immediate steps to do so,” he said in an email to Cr Ong on Thursday.<\/p>\n
Cr Ong responded by putting the email on his Facebook page. The post in question also remained on his page yesterday.<\/p>\n
An independent investigator found Cr Ong in serious breach of the council\u2019s code of conduct after an email he sent last month about a council staff member.<\/p>\n
Next week, councillors are to consider barrister Steph Dyhrberg\u2019s report about the matter.<\/p>\n
If they agree with her findings, they might then impose sanctions, such as inviting Cr Ong to consider resigning or asking him to apologise.<\/p>\n
Cr Ong has said he will not resign.<\/p>\n
His post on Facebook was about the code of conduct case, including coverage by RNZ.<\/p>\n
His account in some ways differed from what was laid out in the investigator\u2019s report.<\/p>\n
The\u00a0Otago Daily Times\u00a0asked Cr Ong what evidence he had to support one of his key claims.<\/p>\n
He did not provide any.<\/p>\n
Ms Dyhrberg found Cr Ong’s behaviour posed a serious risk to the reputation and integrity of the council, as well as to Cr Ong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Controversial Dunedin city councillor Benedict Ong has been told commentary from him on social media is defamatory and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":340320,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-340319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=340319"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340319\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/340320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=340319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=340319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=340319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}