I've been enjoying the comments thread below Julian and Shub's Monbiot piece. George is clearly quite upset at the suggestion that he was responsible for deleting comments and he has defended himself at his own site, stating that he has never asked the CiF moderators to delete anything.
Some commenters, notably Barry Woods, have argued that we should take George at his word, and I must say I think this is right. Having seen a BBC blogger (Richard Black, IIRC) getting one of his comments snipped on his own thread, George's story that he had nothing to do with the deletions is at least credible.
That said, I am also quite taken with Julian William's point that the deletion of anyone who responded to Monbiot's call for evidence against Pachauri very much gave the impression that nobody could meet the challenge. Whether this was a deliberate attempt by the mods to give a false impression or just a case of their being over-cautious is hard to know.
But if we set the past aside for a moment, I would hope that reasonable people could agree that the understatement of income in TERI Europe's accounts is worrying. How was it possible for this money to be overlooked? Were the books not reconciled to the bank statements? If the cheques from the various donors were payable to TERI-Europe then how could they not find their way into the books? Does TERI have more than one bank account? Was a whole bank account missed out from the books? Extraordinary if so. The idea that one can miss 90%(?) of the income of a company out of its books by mistake will simply not wash.
I find this highly disturbing and I hope that George Monbiot does too. I'm quite sure he would not accept a commercial company "losing" such a large proportion of its income.
I wonder if he would like to say something on the subject?