BREAKING NEWS: COURT GRANTS IAN COOK THE RIGHT TO SUE DANDENONG COUNCIL FOR MALICIOUS PROSECUTION.
#SlugGate … Ian Cook is suing Dandenong Council. This is the trial that will prove who planted the slug, and why. Ian Cook has secured the right to sue the Council after they falsely charged him with 96 offences, threatened him with over a million dollars in fines, and potential jail time. PLEASE share this link and, if you can, donate to support Ian Cook’s fight against Council corruption or scan the QR code. Your help can make a difference!
What Happened to I Cook Foods?
I Cook Foods was a family-owned food manufacturing business that employed 41 workers at its Dandenong facility. Established by Ian Cook and his wife Dena Cook in 1985, I Cook Foods had grown into the largest private provider of delivered meals in Victoria, Australia.
The business provided more than 25,000 meals a week, servicing the charitable sector through “Meals on Wheels” and directly at hospitals and aged-care facilities.
I Cook Foods was a genuine family business, with Ian and Dena’s son Ben eventually taking up the role of General Manager.
Ian, Dena and Ben didn’t just care about their family. They cared about many other families. They made a point of employing people from the local area who needed a little extra help in life. These people proved to be great workers and wonderful people to work with.
At the time of I Cook Food’s closure and destruction by the Victorian State Government, some 15% of the company’s staff had a disability but were nevertheless employed on full wages, just like anyone else.
It took a corrupt local council and a corrupt state government a handful of weeks to comprehensively destroy everything the Cook family had worked for over so many years.
This closure and destruction of an important, commercially-successful and genuinely ethical business occurred in February 2019, just before the global pandemic took hold in Australia.
But if you read on, you’ll see how the destruction of I Cook Foods actually began a decade earlier. You’ll see how the men and women behind the world’s longest pandemic lockdown started their wave of destruction at I Cook Foods. You will see how a “regulator” in fact became a “commercial competitor”.
In 2009, the then Victorian Health Minister Daniel Andrews and the then Federal Minister for Infrastructure and Transport Anthony Albanese, created a catering business called Community Chef based in Altona.
Community Chef was funded by the State and Federal governments as well as a number of Victorian Councils, including the City of Greater Dandenong where the I Cook Foods production facility was located. Flush with millions of dollars of taxpayer and ratepayer support, Community Chef would go on to compete with a number of private catering businesses, including I Cook Foods. One of those businesses, ISS, went broke and 80 people lost their jobs because of Community Chef.
By 2019, the books of Community Chef showed that it had lost over $30 million. How it managed to “lose” this extraordinary sum of money – completely funded by the Victorian public – and where this money actually “went” should be a matter of the gravest public concern. Clearly, this sum of money was not “lost” in the course of normal commercial operations (as any such business would simply otherwise collapse) but rather the Community Chef “venture” was sustained by the State and some local Governments for “other reasons”. It never made an annual profit.
Also, by 2019, the former Health Minister who set up Community Chef, Daniel Andrews, had not only become the Premier of Victoria but had been the Premier already for some 5 years.