Greater Manchester mayor says stories that Marie-France van Heel has links to electric car charging network are ‘frankly disgraceful’
Andy Burnham has hit out at critics of Greater Manchester’s Clean Air Zone (CAZ) who he says have made “frankly disgraceful” false claims about his wife’s professional links to an electric car charging network.
The Greater Manchester mayor accuses opponents of the CAZ of spreading false information about Marie-France van Heel, a marketing executive who married Burnham in 2000.
Van Heel is the strategy director and managing partner of a small marketing and brand agency, Heavenly. One of her clients is Be.EV, which has a contract with Transport for Greater Manchester to maintain and grow the region’s electric vehicle charging network.
Burnham declared this at a Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) meeting in September 2021, recusing himself from a discussion of the region’s electric vehicle charging infrastructure strategy so that he was not part of the decision-making.
But as opposition to the CAZ has grown, van Heel’s relationship to Be.EV has been widely exaggerated online in order to suggest the Burnham family will personally profit if owners of polluting vehicles switch to electric cars as a result of the CAZ.
There have been widely shared false claims that the couple own shares in Be.EV, that van Heel will receive bonuses from the firm if their profits increase as a result of the CAZ, and that she has a financial interest in the...
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