Freetown City Council, established in 1893, was the victim of a colonial government which concentrated authority in white hands and resented the survival of a municipality run by Africans. Successive governors regularly presented it as a scapegoat, along with the whole Krio community, for disturbances in Freetown, notably the 1919 anti-Syrian riots and the 1926 railway strike. In 1925 financial malpractices in the council were disclosed and some officials were prosecuted. The following year the Mayor, Cornelius May, editor of the leading newspaper, the Sierra Leone Weekly News, and a highly respected public figure, was charged with conspiracy to defraud, along with the Town Clerk and the City Treasurer, and was given a nine-month prison sentence. Then, on the recommendation of a Commission of Inquiry, the City Council was dissolved and replaced by a Municipal Board.