Colin James Clark

Multi-Millionaire Colin James Clark was born 20 May 1969.

His father Robbie owned a 1000 acre+ farm and three cottages (rented out) near Auchterless, In 1990.

His early career in agriculture to him to Lincolnshire where he developed an interest in organic farming of products for direct sale.

Circumstances forced his return to Scotland in 2005 and his acceptance of the task of overall management and development of the farming business of Thomastown Farm and Cottages when his brothers expressed a preference to pursue careers not involving farming.

He is the owner of Finask House a Category B Listed property in Daviot, Aberdeenshire, valued at around £1.5 million.

 

 

 

Business and Financial interests outside politics: R&M Clark Farmers

Selling finished beef cattle and store lambs are the main enterprises with annual purchase of 1,400 Continental cross steers and 1500 store lambs.

The aim of the business is to pile on the beef over a period of 60 days then get them to the market.

The Scottish taxpayer provides substantial financial support to the business by way of farming subsidies. In the years 2015/2016, the enterprise was advanced a total of £213,129.00p

 

 

Nessgro Ltd:

Clark shares a controlling 50% interest and is Chairman of Inverness based Nessgro Ltd (annual turnover £1.5m and growing) which specializes in organic root vegetable production on 120 hectares of land.

It has its own wash factory and packhouse which allows a direct to customer sale business.

The company was awarded the prestigious Grower of the Year in 2007 and in 2013 won the Marks and Spencer’s Scottish produce category as well as their Champion of Champions Farming for the Future Award.

The Scottish taxpayer provides substantial financial support to the business by way of farming subsidies. In the year 2016, the enterprise was advanced a total of £134,049.00p

 

 There is no Scotland claim

Edith Davidson, from Innerleithen, wrote to Marks & Spencer after gaining information that the high street giant was labelling Scottish whisky as British.

She spoke of her shock after Marks & Spencer responded telling her to respect the result of the 2014 referendum and accept that Scotland was now “a part of the country known as England”.

 

 

Shareholding (more than £70K) – Clark’s extensive investment portfolio and pensions are managed by Balmoral Asset Management Ltd (Edinburgh)

Shareholding:

Sciemus Ltd; technology and insurance

The Lloyd’s insurance consultancy operating in the space, power, renewable energy, cyber and mining industries, has recently formed an investing partnership with offshore Bermuda registered HSCM Bermuda.

Maven Capital Partners UK LLP (Maven)

Maven Capital Partners is an independent alternative asset manager, with over £415m of assets under management.

Maven was formed in 2009 after a buyout of the Aberdeen Asset Management private equity business and operates from a nationwide network of regional offices.

They arrange finance for management buyouts, acquisition finance, expansion capital and development capital, for companies valued at up to £25 million throughout the UK.

More detail here: (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/maven-capital-partners)

Examples of Marven/Clark recent financial investments

Maven Capital Partners has led a £5.5m investment into Flexlife, an Aberdeen-based energy service business. In the face of significant competition for the mandate from other private equity houses, Maven has syndicated the deal with the respected energy sector fund, Simmons Parallel Energy. The new funding package will help support Flexlife through its next phase of development.

Maven Capital Partners has bought a controlling stake in the R&M Engineering oil services business from Robbie Mackay in a £5 million deal that shows its faith in the potential of the North Sea market.

The Glasgow-based private equity investor believes R&M Engineering could enjoy years of strong growth amid booming investment in the North Sea.

Based in Huntly, Aberdeenshire, R&M Engineering provides services like the design and fabrication of modules and pipework for oil rigs that are being refurbished or for new facilities.

Private equity firm Maven Capital Partners has led a £14 million management buyout of Forfar- based specialist mechanical and hydraulic engineering firm, Rmec Ltd.

Glasgow-based Maven has invested £7.5 million to support the Rmec buyout, which will be utilized to expand its rental fleet, further develop its workshop and storage facilities and bolster its management team.

Rmec specializes in the manufacture, maintenance, repair, testing, recertification and rental of well services equipment for the oil and gas industry.

It currently employs 20 staff and is reported to have generated sales in the region of £9 million in the most recent financial year.

In March 2013, Maven clients invested £4.6 million to acquire the former Clarence Hotel in Llandudno, North Wales.

The property had been vacant for some time and the existing structure will be comprehensively refurbished, along with a limited new-build on parts of the upper floor, to provide 82 en-suite bedrooms to Travelodge’s specifications with a further two retail units on the ground floor.

The transaction qualifies for BPRA (Business Premises Renovation Allowance) which enables UK taxpaying investors to claim tax allowances against much of the capital invested in refurbishing the empty building and returning it to commercial use.

The completed development is scheduled for completion in Spring 2015.

Maven Capital Partners has secured £7 million of funding to deliver an new hotel development in Glasgow’s Merchant City. The Glasgow-based private equity firm said the funding scheme, utilizing the benefits of the Business Premises Renovation Allowance (BPRA), will include the purchase of Telfer House, a currently empty office building.

Maven said the building will be refurbished into a 96-bedroom ibis Styles hotel, which will be managed by a specialist hotel management company, RedefineBDL.

Ramsay Duff, of Maven Capital Partners, said: “We are delighted to have secured this opportunity for our investors, offering useful tax incentives with a high quality underlying property asset.

 

 

Politics

10 Jun 2017: A crowd-funder begging advert: Please donate to support Colin and send him to represent the Gordon constituency at Westminster.

Only Colin can join and contribute to the Government at Westminster.

Fighting an election costs money as we need to produce letters, leaflets, posters, and campaigning materials to help Colin get his message out across the Gordon and beat Alex Salmond. We need £2000.

 

 

Tory defense of the independence of Scottish affairs

The 2017 General Election returned a baker’s dozen of Conservative Scottish MPs to Westminster.

Ruth Davidson’s force provided the numbers allowing a minority of English MP’s to form a UK government with a barely operational majority (with the support of the Democratic Unionists furnished with a £1.5 billion bribe).

Forming part of the campaigning strategy the party machine in Scotland spread the rumour that Scots Tories returned to Westminster would act as a party within a party, taking instructions from Ruth Davidson.

But that undertaking has proved to be yet another “pie in the sky” unfulfilled promise primarily due to the reality that Tory Unionist MP’s were elected to office without a workable manifesto.

There is the added fact that Ruth Davidson’s Scottish MPs are obliged to work under the Whip system which demands absolute obedience from MPs under threat of removal of party support from any MP who might wish to abstain or vote against the government.

The concluding factor is Brexit. Very few elected politicians in Scotland, (including a significant number of Scottish Unionist MPs) voted to leave the European Union but the entire block of Tory MPs will be required to vote with the government in all events pertaining to Brexit. Hardly acceptable politics, MP’s voting against the wishes of their constituents.

 

 

1 Jan 2018: Scottish Tory Unionist MP’s Contrived Attempt to Muddy the Waters on Broadband Revealed As A Cynical Ploy To Cover Tory Government Failings (https://caltonjock.com/)

 

 

17 Jan 2018: Brexit

Scotland’s 13 Tory MPs chose to please Theresa May over standing up for their constituents when they voted for Whitehall’s “naked power grab” from Holyrood.

During the final stages of the EU withdrawal Bill, the Tories refused to vote with all other Scottish MPs to back a Labour amendment which would have meant powers repatriated from Brussels after Brexit would have come to Scotland. (The National)

 

 

Scottish Tory MP’s vote to carry on with wage repression and increased austerity measures

The Tory government defeated a Labour Party amendment to the Queen’s Speech calling for an end to cuts to the police and the fire service, the end of the 1% public sector pay cap and to give emergency and public services a fair pay rise by 323 to 309 votes.

Northern Ireland’s 10 DUP MP’s despite speaking out against austerity before the election agreed to vote with Conservative MP’s to give Theresa May the majority she needed after she agreed a £1.5billion bung to Northern Ireland to win their votes.

There was much criticism from bodies representing Britain’s 5 million emergency and public services staff of the government’s refusal to rethink public sector cuts after their response to recent terrorist events and the courage of firefighters who risked their lives in the Grenfell Tower blaze.

Especially after Theresa May told a nurse on BBC Question Time that there is “no magic money tree” for a pay rise to stop nurses having to turn to food banks and payday loans in the run-up to her snap election, before agreeing to part with £1.5billion in return for DUP support.

The 13 Scottish MPs should have abstained since the business had no direct impact on Scotland but they voted with the government against the amendment. So much for independent thinking.

Andrew C Bowie (Conservative – West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine)
Colin Clark (Conservative – Gordon)
David Duguid (Conservative – Banff, and Buchan)
Luke Graham (Conservative – Ochil and South Perthshire)
Bill Grant (Conservative – Ayr, Carrick, and Cumnock)
Kirstene Hair (Conservative – Angus)
Mr Alister Jack (Conservative – Dumfries, and Galloway)
Stephen Kerr (Conservative – Stirling)
John Lamont (Conservative – Berwickshire, Roxburgh, and Selkirk)
Paul Masterton (Conservative – East Renfrewshire)
David Mundell (Conservative – Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale, and Tweeddale)
Douglas Ross (Conservative – Moray)
Ross Thomson (Conservative – Aberdeen South)

 

 

 

4 Dec 2017: Gordon MP Colin Clark took time out to volunteer during a collection for the Trussell Trust foodbank.

The Scottish Conservative MP joined local councillor Lesley Berry and others at the Inverurie Tesco on Harlaw Road. Speaking afterward, Mr. Clark said: “Local people from Inverurie and the surrounding area gave very generously.

We collected a lot of tinned and non-perishable food. “The Trussell Trust provides a fantastic service, which is so important at this colder time of year as we approach Christmas.

“Having met with Trussell Trust in the past, foodbanks provide a safety net and often help people engage with the relevant authorities. “We spend a lot of time doing constituency casework helping people who are finding the welfare system complicated. “Trussell Trust provides for many of those people in crisis and emergency situations.”

The Trussell Trust is a poverty charity that relies heavily on volunteers. More than 40,000 people across the UK volunteered with a foodbank over the past year, helping to get food to people in crisis. (Inverurie Herald)

Comment: Bloody cheek. It is Tory Party welfare cuts that have driven many people to despair as without funds they need to seek the assistance of charities.

 

 

 

 

18 Dec 2017: Colin Clark’s voting record in Parliament

Colin Clark, Conservative MP, votes the same way as other Conservative MPs. He has never rebelled against his party in the current parliament.

 

 

 

17 Jan 2018: Debate in the House of Commons – Cancer Treatment Policy

Henry Smith Tory MP for Crawley – Like many people in this room today, I have lost a family member to blood cancer. Five and a half years ago, my mother died from acute myeloid leukemia, also known as AML, an extremely short time after diagnosis. With conditions such as AML, there is an incredibly short time—sometimes just a matter of days—between being diagnosed and this form of blood cancer taking a life.

A report has been published with a focus on the implementation of the cancer strategy for England, but committee members are keen to learn from examples of good practice in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Colin Clark Tory & Unionist MP for Gordon – In 2015 in the Grampian NHS Board area, which includes my constituency of Gordon, there were 265 new diagnoses of leukemia, lymphoma or myeloma, forming one in every 12 diagnoses in the area that year.

In the same year, 106 lives in the Grampian area were taken by these cancers. It is crucial that we leave no stone unturned in the fight against blood cancers.

That includes research and development, on which the UK Government has a strong record that I very much hope will continue.

I would like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the dedicated staff of Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, which serves my constituency.

The work of the staff in its oncology department is second to none and has saved countless lives over the years.

The start of treatment in Aberdeen Royal Infirmary’s new state-of-the-art radiotherapy department in 2014 was a welcome step forward in the treatment of blood cancers and other cancers in the north-east of Scotland.

The new building will enable the team to deliver new techniques and new forms of therapy to more and more patients—a development that can only be good.

Across Scotland, vacancy rates for consultants and nurses are disappointingly high, However, as with Her Majesty’s Government, budgets are constrained and oncology at the ARI has not been spared, unfortunately, from long-running staff shortages.

For a department that treats cancer patients not just in Gordon but across the north-east of Scotland and even further afield, that is obviously very concerning.

NHS staff and patients must have the security of knowing that their local oncology department is, and always will be, adequately staffed and given the support that it deserves.

Comment: Clark could not resist show-boating. His contribution to the debate was confined to repeating Tory party dogma always critical of the SNP government regardless of truth or a comparison of facts with the NHS in England, on staffing.

 

Philippa Whitford Shadow SNP Spokesperson (Health) – In Scotland, there is the new medicines fund and in England, there is the cancer drugs fund, a slight downside to which is that it is only for cancer.

That might not be a problem for the patients that we are concerned about in this debate, but it is for people with some other diseases.

However, the fund plays a role for drugs that have not yet reached the point of being passed by NICE, but for which some hope is felt.

There was obviously great anxiety when seven key treatments were removed from the cancer drugs fund a few years ago.

Something else that happened a few years ago was that a limit started to be put on the holy grail treatment of bone marrow and stem cell transplant, in those patients with a recurrence were not given the opportunity for a second transplant between the summer of 2016 and the spring of 2017, because that was no longer being commissioned.

Politicians and those high up in organizations such as NHS England need to be conscious that trying to balance the books may pull the rug from underneath people.

The gap of three quarters of a year will have been catastrophic for some people who might have benefited. That must be recognized when decisions are made.

In the Scottish NHS, we do not have mechanisms such as 100-days commissioning, and hearing about it highlights to me how time, energy and people are wasted in trying to knit together a system that has become fragmented.

For the cancer nurse specialists or doctors to have to try to plug a gap, or for patients to fall through the gap because, as was said in one briefing, there are CCGs and commissioning groups that do not even know they are responsible for commissioning that care after the 100 days, is a waste.

I spent more than 30 years working as a breast cancer surgeon and I would not want to have to waste clinical time trying to deal with the gaps between stools.

I think that the friction between what NHS England commissions and what CCGs are responsible for must be looked at.

Data and the auditing of performance are important for driving through the improvement of any service.

I do not mean such things as waiting times, on which we all collect data, but actual clinical standards—how someone is treated and what we would expect.

What would all the clinicians in the area think was good practice?

I do not mean shutting things down, or units being threatened by the Care Quality Commission.

Having developed the breast cancer standards in Scotland in 2000, I can say that sitting in a room with all the breast teams of Scotland and looking at the data in a big PowerPoint on the wall is a dynamic tool for getting people to change practice.

No one goes to work wanting to be the worst team in their country, region or area. Having access to actual clinical data is a great driver of quality.

In England, work is being done on setting up cancer dashboards for the four commonest cancers.

In Scotland, we have them for the 11 commonest cancers.

We have had Scotland-wide breast cancer data since 2003.

I have seen the quality go up simply from our all meeting every year, looking at the data and challenging each other and discussing the data—and sharing solutions.

Whatever problem a unit faces—whatever the reason for their performance going down—someone else in the room will have had that problem before, and solved it.

Such peer review and sharing of practice drives things forward.

One of our big hopes for the cancer alliances is that they will redevelop what existed in cancer networks, which we still use in Scotland: people meet, support each other, and share practice.

The importance of research has been mentioned. As a great believer in the European Union and the things that we have gained from it, I am anxious about our leaving the European Medicines Agency, about the loss of its support mechanism on rare diseases, and about the possibility that we will be outside the clinical trials regulation system, which is designed vastly to reduce the paperwork involved in taking research forward in a clinical trial.

In the end, what we want to come from the research is new treatment—new drugs.

The UK is dynamic in the life sciences and the development of new pharmaceuticals, but the rather bizarre thing is that often our doctors do not get to use them.

For people working in hospitals, that is getting to be a negative feedback loop. We do not get paid extra if we put patients into trials.

There is an enormous amount of paperwork, and people inevitably stay well after time to make sure that things function.

If suddenly at the end of the trial period, when they might be getting the drug funded, they cannot get access to the drug for several years, until it gets through NICE in England or the Scottish Medicines Consortium, those people feel, “Who is gaining? It is not my patients.”

The full debate can be found here. (https://www.theyworkforyou.com/whall/?id=2018-01-17a.358.4&s=speaker%3A25678#g368.1)

Comment: A marked difference. Philippa provided informed comment explaining the different and more effective cancer treatment policies in place in Scotland.

 

 

10 Jan 2018: Gatwick Airport noise

Thomas Tugendhat Chair, Foreign Affairs Committee – I beg to move, that this House has considered growth and noise reduction in Gatwick Airport. The issue of aircraft noise is incredibly important to me, and I am afraid that many in the Chamber will have heard me speak about it many times. Indeed, I have received more correspondence on this issue than on any other since I was elected.

That is unsurprising for those of us who live under the flightpath in the beautiful villages of west Kent, which are the most beautiful in England, as we all know—I declare an interest because our home is there.

The impact of aviation noise on the economic prosperity and environmental sustainability of our communities has been severe.

Colin Clark Conservative, Gordon – I will just say how important the south-east airports are to the regional airports and how important economically the south-east airports are to Aberdeen.

I know that he will visit the north-east soon, so today I will highlight the heliport at Aberdeen.

During his campaigning on noise, I would also like him to emphasise the issue of helicopters, because, as he is well aware, helicopters dwell, as opposed to just flying in on a flight-line.

The residents of Dyce, near Aberdeen International airport, are blighted by the noise from helicopters.

I would be very grateful if he could remember helicopters as well as fixed-wing aircraft.

Christopher Chope Conservative, Christchurch – Order. This is a debate on a narrow subject—growth and noise reduction at Gatwick airport. Okay?

Comment: Clark just cannot resist broadcasting the negative regardless of the relevance of the content.

 

 

10 Jan 2018: House of Commons Prime minister’s Question Time

Colin Clark Conservative, Gordon – Does the Prime Minister welcome the findings of the Social Research survey

(http://natcen.ac.uk/media/1528078/NatCen-What-Scotland-Makes-Of-Brexit.pdf)

that the majority of Scots believe that the rules on trade and immigration should be the same in Scotland as in the rest of the UK? It looks like they agree that we are better together.

Theresa May The Prime Minister, Leader of the Conservative Party – My hon. Friend has raised a very important point. People across the UK want to see controlled immigration—that is people in Scotland as well as people in the rest of the United Kingdom.

As we leave the European Union, we will be able to introduce our own immigration rules and to control that immigration to Britain from Europe.

The only point of differentiation is that, of course, we do have a Scotland-only shortage occupation list to recognise the particular labour market needs in Scotland.

For the most part, that actually matches the UK-wide shortage occupation list, which shows that this is an issue for the whole of the UK, and that we need the same policy approach.

Comment: A planted question for Theresa May advertising publication of the report, the views and opinions of which contained in the report are those only of Prof John Curtice, Professor of Politics at Strathclyde University.

Clark was selective in deciding the question for the Prime Minister highlighting a comment positive for the Tory government.

He ignored comments on Agriculture and Fishing which indicated over 60% of the Scottish electorate wished both to be devolved.