England’s Tower Hamlets mayor Lutfur Rahman, a Bangladeshi-origin first elected Muslim mayor in Britain, has been removed from his office after being found guilty of electoral fraud.

A report published in The Guardian on Thursday said that Royal Courts of Justice found Lutfur Rahman guilty of ‘vote-rigging, seeking spiritual influence through local imams and wrongly branding his Labour rival a racist.’

Lutfur Rahman was ordered by the court to vacate the post of mayor and was banned from seeking office in the next mayoral race as the 2014 mayoral election had been declared invalid.

Judge Richard Mawrey QC, who handed down his verdict on Thursday, also ordered Rahman to pay £250,000 as the court found him guilty of spending money from allocated local grants to buy votes, reports The Guardian.

Lutfur Rahman, however, denied the allegations, which he dismissed as cynical and politically motivated.

After a 10-week hearing, the verdict came in the lawsuit that was filed by four borough residents who had asked to declare last year’s mayoral election, in which Rahman won over Labour rival, John Biggs, void and be rerun.

London Borough of Tower Hamlets is a borough to the east of the City of London and north of the River Thames.

Lutfur Rahman won the mayoral poll of this borough with 43% votes in 2014.