Chamber and committees

Okay. Thank you very much.

Thank you, convener. I have no relevant interests to declare.

No, I will listen to the example that Mr Satti gives us—oh, I am sorry, I thought that he was going to give us an example. I was going to say that you talked about the fact that the board did not see everything, but, for example, the governance framework states that you are meant to get prior Scottish Government approval

“before incurring expenditure for any purpose that is or might be considered novel, contentious or repercussive”,

so did the board get to see anything that could be considered to be those things, or was that just left to the previous chief executive and it is all coming out in the wash now?

It has, but how did you get to a situation where you were spending all that money on training courses for senior staff, with one part of the organisation feeling free to do that and the board being completely unaware of that?

Okay, thank you. My final question is for Mr Satti and Mr McGill. It is about 3x1 Group, which appears to provide a public relations consultancy service. Is that correct?

So you received all the required approvals from the board. Was it a single tender contract or was it put out to competitive tender?

Mr Satti, you have now removed the retainer for the services of a King’s counsel. Why is that retainer no longer required, and why was it in place for so long?

I do not think that anybody is criticising the fact that you spend money on training. It is very important that your staff are well trained and that they get everything that is required. The issue is whether you were doing a best-value audit on that spending. I am sure that, in most cases, you were, but there are some cases where that seems dubious. Why did you not have oversight of that spending?

I completely accept that, but how did you get to a situation where someone in your organisation was making decisions that seemed to be so far out of the norm?

I appreciate that, but is it normal for public bodies to keep a KC on such a retainer? That is a serious question, to which I do not know the answer.