Association of Trades Councils, who sent him as a delegate to the South East Regional Council of the Trades Union Congress. Dromey attended the 1976 "Luanda Trial" "Mercenaries' Trial" in Luanda, Angola, as an "observer". As secretary of the local Trades Council he also had a prominent role in supporting the strike at the Grunwick film processing laboratory which lasted from 1976 to 1978. The mostly-female Asian workforce at Grunwick went on strike to demand that company boss George Ward recognise their union; instead, Ward dismissed the strikers, leading to a two-year-long confrontation involving mass picketing and some violence. The strike was ultimately unsuccessful. Dromey was appointed deputy general secretary of the TGWU, having lost the 2003 election for general secretary to Tony Woodley by a wide margin. Controversies Links between NCCL and PIE Dromey was a member of the executive committee of the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL; now Liberty) in the 1970s during a period when the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) had taken out corporate membership of NCCL. Dromey denied supporting PIE or its aims, stating that he actively opposed the links between the two groups and voted for the expulsion of the group at the NCCL Annual General Meeting. Cash for Peerages On 15 March 2006, during the Cash for Peerages scandal, Dromey said he was unaware – despite being the Labour Party treasurer – of £3.5 million loaned to the Labour Party in 2005 by three persons who were subsequently nominated for life peerages (Chai Patel, Sir David Garrard, and Barry Townsley). Loans made on commercial terms, as was claimed to be the case here, are not subject to reporting requirements to the Electoral Commission. Dromey stated publicly that neither he nor Labour's elected National Executive Committee (NEC) chairman, Sir Jeremy Beecham, had knowledge of or involvement in the loans, and that he had become aware of them when he read about them in the newspapers. Dromey stated that he was regularly consulted about conventional bank loans. As well as announcing his own investigation, he called on the Electoral Commission to investigate the issue of political parties taking out loans from non-commercial sources. His report was discussed by the NEC on 21 March 2006. Labour Party donations scandal Dromey was caught up in a further financial scandal in 2007, as he was responsible for party finances, which included more than £630,000 in illegal donations from