INVESTIGATORS ordered in by Boris Johnson, the new mayor of London, have found endemic waste in the way millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money was spent by the former regime of Ken Livingstone.

Huge sums are unaccounted for, have gone missing or were spent with little tangible benefit, according to the audit. And as the accountants got to work, Johnson discovered 39 bottles of fine wine, including Château-neuf-du-Pape, left in the mayor’s office by his predecessor.

A separate police investigation, led by John Yates, the Scotland Yard detective who headed the cash for honours inquiry, has uncovered evidence of corruption that it believes will produce criminal prosecutions.

Both inquiries focus mainly on the London Development Agency (LDA), a body overseen by Livingstone, which spent £1.5 billion in four years awarding grants to an array of “community projects”.

Johnson, and the Conservatives, hope the investigations will demonstrate the party is capable of rooting out sleaze and saving taxpayers’ money, despite Tory MEPs recently being accused of abusing their expenses.

Within days of being elected mayor last month, Johnson appointed Patience Wheatcroft, a former financial journalist , to lead a team of forensic accountants to investigate how money was spent under Livingstone.

Speaking before handing an interim report to the mayor on Friday, Wheatcroft said she was horrified by what she had discovered.

“It was an organisation where success seems to have been measured by money [paid] out rather than objectively determined results,” she said.

“Monitoring of projects was scant. Evaluation of effectiveness minimal. The culture of the place was that underspending was deemed to be a failure.” Officials from the LDA have revealed that they were encouraged to compete with their peers to spend the most public funds. Only projects with a budget of more than £6m had to be approved by the LDA’s board. The investigators claim “due diligence” was often not conducted before organisations were given taxpayers’ money, and that there was inadequate monitoring of how money was spent once it had been granted.

In one case, the LDA paid funds into the accounts of a company that was dormant. Investigators have been unable to trace what happened to the money.

Another project was awarded £1.43m over several years – yet only now is the LDA inquiring what it was spent on.

Other projects to fall under Wheatcroft’s scrutiny include the Bernie Grant arts centre in Tottenham, which has spent £4.3m, and Rich Mix, a cinema and community centre in Bethnal Green. The investigators allege that the LDA failed to maintain adequate audit trails and that millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money appears to be unaccounted for.

“What I want is value for money,” said Johnson . “Precious taxpayers’ money should be spent in ways which have maximum impact. Tangible practical measures to address an issue are clearly preferable to vague, abstract but expensive initiatives to highlight a problem.”

Following a tip from Wheatcroft’s team, police have now launched an investigation into Caribbean Showcase, an event set up by Livingstone on the same day and in direct competition to the Notting Hill carnival.

A spokesman for the mayor said: “We believe that there is evidence that GLA [Greater London Authority] systems and processes were not followed, and that cash may have gone missing or been misappropriated and a criminal act may have been committed.”

Caribbean Showcase is the fifth project funded by the LDA to come under police investigation. All of these schemes have links with Lee Jasper, a close associate of Livingstone who earned a six-figure salary as a race adviser to the former mayor. The other schemes being investigated by the police are:

- Diversity International, a company run by an associate of Jasper. It was paid £346,000 to create a website for London businesses that never appeared. The money is said to have vanished.

- Brixton Base, a training centre for young people. Jasper was the patron. Earlier this year LDA auditors found at least £70,000 awarded to the project was missing.

- Green Badge taxi school, also run by Jasper associates, was awarded £350,000 to train people from ethnic minorities to become cab drivers. It is alleged the school trained only a handful of people.

- Ethnic Mutual, a financial services company, which received £350,000 from the LDA. Jasper has admitted that £18,000 from this venture was paid to bail out a company he was a director of.

Wheatcroft will publish her completed report into Livingstone’s regime next month.

Livingstone said at the weekend: “The fact that even a Tory-dominated panel keeps repeatedly coming back to such a small number of projects which allegedly failed and which represents such a tiny fraction of the LDA’s budget actually shows the organisation’s overall success.”

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