Sadiq Khan is being investigated over the tickets (Image: Getty)
Sadiq Khan is being investigated after he accepted free tickets to a concert worth £3,000.
Whether the “exercised an appropriate level of caution” before accepting the freebies is the subject of new probe by City Hall’s ethics watchdog.
Mr Khan worth £500 each from LS Events to attend the London leg of the Eras Tour on August 15.
The events management company had been previously contracted by City Hall – prompting Conservative assembly member Susan Hall to lodge a formal complaint against the Mayor.
She alleged that he had declared the tickets late and inaccurately, that there had been a possible conflict of interest and that he should have exercised more caution in weighing up the decision.
Monitoring officer Rory McKenna, who is paid £96,000 a year to keep an eye on ethical conduct, rejected three of the complaints but is pursuing the claim that the Mayor acted without due caution in taking the tickets.
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Sadiq Khan took his family to the Eras Tour concert in London last summer (Image: Getty)
Khan was one of several prominent Labour figures to accept complimentary passes to Swift’s record-breaking tour, with 11 MPs including Prime Minister scooping the freebies, which added up to nearly £18,000.
The PM bowed to pressure amid a deafening hospitality row last autumn to pay back the £4,000 he accepted from the Football Association.
The Mayor was also forced to defend himself after it emerged that he and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper had been involved in talks about Swift’s security detail, with a tax-payer-funded motorbike convoy shuttling her back and forth from Wembley Stadium.
Mr Khan insisted that Met Police had “operational independence”, adding that he speaks regularly with the force about “security issues” and would be expected to “raise the issue of security around record-breaking concerts”, especially after a terror threat forced the American singer to cancel three dates in Vienna and in the wake of July’s Southport attack.
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The Greater London Authority (GLA) said a new investigation would establish “if the Mayor exercised an appropriate level of caution in deciding to accept the tickets”, The Sun reported.
“Any gift accepted by the Mayor is declared openly and transparently,” a spokesperson for Mr Khan said. “In this case there was an administrative error which was corrected.
“The Mayor has no involvement in the procurement process for GLA events, nor in the tendering of these contracts.”
However Ms Hall has insisted that more answers are “desperately needed” about why Mr Khan “declared these tickets late, initially mis-declared who donated them, that they were … undervalued [and] that the donor was a GLA contractor”.