First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, Tory leader Douglas Ross and disgraced SNP Finance Minister Derek MacKay, who has been blamed for the ferry fiasco.
By Bill Heaney
Derek MacKay, the disgraced SNP finance minister, who quit office on the eve of Budget Day at Holyrood; failed to resign and continued to trouser his substantial salary despite not turning up for meetings, was today “thrown under a bus” by First Minister Nicola Sturgeon.
Ms Sturgeon placed the blame squarely on his shoulders when she named Mackay as the person responsible for the so-called “ferries fiasco” which brought a Clyde shipyard into public ownership and then signed off an order for two Calmac ferries which are five years late and around £250 million of public money over budget.
Conservative Liz Smith told parliament yesterday: “The whole ferries fiasco comes hard on the heels of plenty of other examples of SNP mismanagement of taxpayers’ money—the cases of Burntisland Fabrications, Prestwick Airport and Rangers FC administrators, to name just three—and of Audit Scotland’s concerns that there is insufficient transparency from Scottish Government ministers about public spending.
“Will the Scottish Government commit to Scottish Conservative plans that ministers should open the books regularly and that we should have a formal finance bill procedure in Parliament so that we can have effective scrutiny of what the Government is spending taxpayers’ money on, in order that such a fiasco never happens again?”
Today (Thursday) Tory leader Douglas Ross baited the First Minister mercilessly about Secret Scotland and the SNP’s record of covering up one expensive blunder after another.
A full report of today’s proceedings will appear in The Democrat later today.