Chamber and committees

Yes, I mentioned the figure of £128.25 million.

FMEL accepted £45 million from the Scottish Government, but it said that it did not want the loans.

Mr McColl, my main interest here is obviously in following the public pound. A lot of public money has been invested and I am keen to understand how it has been dealt with. At the point of nationalisation, the vessels were largely incomplete.

I want to come back in on a couple of points that you touched on earlier. First, I have managed to dig out the cost of purchasing FMEL’s assets. I realise that there are all sorts of offset figures involved, so this is a crude figure, but it is £7.5 million. That was the valuation put on all the assets in the yard, which is very far short of the money that went in there.

Secondly, the milestone payments were £83.25 million. In fact, £82.5 million was for milestone payments, but £0.75 million was for contract variations. That seems a very small figure, after listening to what you have been saying—

How can the committee identify those variations and understand the costs against them?

What would your estimated value be?

You are saying that the money was absorbed by changes and so on to the specifications. Is there any document that lays that out and puts cost against that?

Why did FMEL never pursue its claim in court?

So you are saying that the Government has this information.

Certain statements in the RECC report seem to raise a question. For example, in paragraph 157, the report states:

“the profile of milestone payments may have resulted in the contractor progressing certain work on the vessels either incorrectly or out of sequence purely in order to trigger payments against the contract”.

—and percentage of fabrication, that takes us back full circle to the value that was in the yard, which I believe, although I am talking from memory here, so this is open to correction, was something over £8 million, yet £128 million—