‘Malicious Beggar’ untroubled by newspaper ‘hatchet job’

Notorious, unemployed conspiracy theorist, Raja Miah, who operates a series of discredited, frequently banned social media platforms from a room in his plush Mossley, Tameside apartment, is to be put under the microscope later in the week by the Manchester Evening News.

The regional daily has sent him a list of around twenty questions to which he has, quite properly, been afforded right of reply. The article, in which he is to feature centrally, has already been described by The Malicious Beggar, as he is widely known on social media, as a ‘hatchet job’.

He told viewers of one of his rambling, self-serving, hornswoggling Recusant Nine Facebook broadcasts last week that he is is not at all worried by the exposé: It is dismissed as what he claims is part of a wider conspiracy to silence him that includes, at the very least, every other newspaper that covers the neighbouring Borough of Oldham, the town’s MPs, Labour Councillors, Oldham Council senior managers and the entire Greater Manchester Police force – and, of course, the author of this article, fellow Yorkshireman, Neil Wilby.

At least part of the article, authored by well known local democracy reporter, Charlotte Green, is expected to be the product of a recent interview with a child sexual exploitation survivor in Oldham known as ‘Sophie’ (or Sam). The latter ‘hates his guts’ and denounces his exploitation of victims and survivors to simply make money for himself. Hence ‘The Malicious Beggar’ handle. Miah has previously attacked ‘Sophie’ on his various social media platforms after a dispute between them arose over her right to anonymity and consent to publish details about her case.

Bradford-born Miah is also expected to justify why he consistently describes Oldham as ‘my town’ when he moved away in 2004, just as soon as he could afford to do so. He recently claimed to have attended infants’ school in Oldham which would be remarkable since, in his own words, he said previously that his family moved to East Lancashire when he was 8 years old.

An ancillary, oft-repeated claim that he speaks for ‘my townsfolk’ (apparently all of them in Oldham) is also on the table. His core support, on his own admission, is around 100 followers who fund him through subscriptions and overpriced merchandise. Which leaves approximately 231,900 other Oldhamers mostly unaffected by his hateful, divisive, vengeful narrative.

Following a recent appearance at Manchester Magistrates’ Court, where he is facing trial over allegations of harassing a 39 year old female lawyer (read more here), he claimed, as a result of their tightly regulated reporting of those proceedings, that the MEN had been ‘telling lies’ about him ‘for the past three years’.

An interesting statement to make given his highly combative and, apparently, litigious nature, as his only challenge to what that newspaper has previously written about him, in that period, ended in abject humiliation.

A finding by the newspaper regulator, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), found that his complaints were groundless (read more here).

More recently, IPSO also ruled against Miah when he complained, amongst other issues, that The Oldham Times had wrongly published that he was arrested as part of Operation Hexagon, an investigation concerning historic allegations of child sexual exploitation (read IPSO ruling here).

A lengthy list of journalists who work (or have previously worked) for those newspapers are routinely harassed and some subjected to unpleasant physical threats by Miah. Charlotte Green, is amongst those regularly smeared for doing her job, as, very regrettably, she herself is a sex assault survivor.

It is inevitable that there will be a further Miah backlash against journalists over the forthcoming article – and it is fervently hoped that Reach plc will, belatedly, take appropriate and robust action if the reaction strays into areas where either criminal action or civil restraint become necessary.

UPDATE: Raja Miah in a post on his Recusant Nine Facebook page in the early afternoon of Tuesday 30th August, 2022, has revealed the list of questions put to him by the Manchester Evening News:

As one might expect, it is accompanied by smears against the sender – and the comments he incites, below his post, from his deeply unpleasant group of supporters whom self-style, appositely, as The Rabble, are mostly disgraceful slurs against her.

These are Miah’s concluding remarks in his post, addressed to The Rabble:

“Feel free to send me suggestions on my responses to Ms GREEN before tomorrow’s deadline (31st August, 2022). She appears to be getting impatient. Perhaps I should offer to visit her at her home address with my responses”.

Page last updated Tuesday 30th August, 2022 at 1845hrs

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