Chamber and committees

Perhaps that is something that can be followed up.

Let us get to the interesting bit: £128.25 million of public money was paid into FMEL, in one way or another. When FMEL went into administration and was nationalised, there was basically nothing there—a few million quid’s worth of unfinished ships and some bits of metal about the yard. What happened to all that money?

I accept the differential between the two types of payment. However, it is fair to conflate them as money that went into the company. It received tens of millions of pounds of public money. What was that spent on, given the fact that the vessels were so incomplete? Where did the money go? At times, apparently—according to some of the bits and pieces of the Auditor General’s report that I have been looking at—only a handful of people were working on the ships, so, for much of the time, it certainly did not go on payroll. Where did the money go?

I will move on to different ground. As you might be aware, throughout these evidence sessions, the one thing that has concerned me is the money—we need to follow the money. I have two questions to ask, but I will come back to that principle.

Looking at the way in which the project was set up, I think that there were clearly weaknesses in the project governance. For example, the programme steering group, which was chaired by Transport Scotland, did not really have a clear role, yet CMAL was bringing issues to it, although we do not know where they went. What improvements have been made since then? The issues with governance clearly led to failures in the relationships and possibly in the project itself.

What improvements have you made for future new vessels to ensure that the process is much more tightly controlled and managed, and that the governance issues do not recur?

All that information would have come to PwC from the same company that was optimistically saying that everything was going to be okay.

So what was the point of the PSG?

It sounds pretty wishy-washy, to be honest. It does not sound like the PSG was of much effective use at all.

Did FMEL’s parent company contribute anything at all to supporting FMEL?

That was the purpose of the loans, although I assume that the unspoken argument is that the intention was to keep the business running as a going concern and keep people employed. Where there any conditions attached to the loans and were they adhered to? What measures were put in place to ensure that the loans achieved the intended impact?

In taking over the business, you did not take over its books.

So the Government should have received financial information from FMEL. Did it receive that information?