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The Lochaber Debacle – Correspondence regarding Mary McAllan ( her daughter is a government Minister) the Director of Economic Development.

Information requested: Correspondence, including emails, letters, text messages, WhatsApp messages and internal memos sent or received or included via ‘cc’ing’ Mary McAllan, Director of Economic Development to or from Deloitte or employees of Deloitte and GFG Alliance or its subsidiaries.

Documents supplied

Click to access FoI%2B-%2B202100238729%2B-%2BSupporting%2BDocument%2B1.pdf

Click to access FoI%2B-%2B%2B202100238729%2B-%2BSupporting%2BDocument%2B2.pdf

The value of Scottish taxpayers’ guarantee to metal magnate Gupta is £586 million

The F.T. reported the Scottish Government provided a guarantee of £586 million to Sanjeev Gupta’s company GFG Alliance as part of the company’s purchase of the Lochaber smelter.

The figure was made public for the first time after a two-year transparency battle.

The Scottish Government now estimates the net present value of the remaining guaranteed payments at £285.9m.

The revelation comes after ministers were slapped on the wrist for withholding the information from the public, with opposition leaders labelling it a “dodgy deal” and claiming the SNP was “desperate to avoid scrutiny”.

Concerns over the deal were raised after meetings between then-rural economy secretary Fergus Ewing and GFG Alliance figures came to light.

The agreement saw the Scottish Government guarantee 25 years of power purchases by Mr Gupta’s company from another business owned by his father, with the guarantee funding the purchase of the aluminium smelter.

The guarantee allowed Greensill Capital to transform the guarantee into nearly £300m of debt with a credit rating equivalent to UK sovereign bonds to be created, funding the purchase.

The deal with the Scottish Government was provided when the smelter in Lochaber was purchased by GFG Alliance alongside two hydropower plants from Rio Tinto in 2016.

GFG Alliance also promised the construction of an alloy wheels factory near the smelter, which was scrapped last year in favour of a £94m recycled aluminium factory, which could have created 2,000 jobs. Earlier this year the government admitted just 50 additional jobs had been created by the deal.

Gupta’s company hit financial difficulty earlier this year due to the collapse of Greensill Capital, which was partially blamed as Gupta’s company began to default on the more than $5bn (£3.7bn) of debt GFG Alliance had borrowed from Greensill.

The guarantee was reportedly provided, covering annual amounts between £14m and £32m, in return for a fee initially valued at £21.4m, but later written down to zero with a £33m provision due to the potential exposure of the deal.

GFG Alliance said: “The Lochaber aluminium smelter is a profitable operation, and GFG Alliance’s commitment to invest in a new recycling and aluminium billet plant there will secure the future of the operations, create new high-quality employment in the area and provide opportunities for the local supply chain.”

Ministers were also criticised by Scotland’s information watchdog for failing to release the total value of the deal after they claimed their commercial interests would be harmed by its release.

In a decision notice published in mid-October, Scottish Information Commissioner Daren Fitzhenry criticised the use of commercial interest as a defence, saying it was unlikely the release of the information would prejudice the negotiation of future guarantees. He said:

“The ministers do not, in general, operate in a commercial environment and the commissioner does not consider them to be doing so simply because they are providing funding to, or guaranteeing the liabilities of, business.

“They do not undertake such activities as participants in the market with the businesses concerned, in pursuit of profit, but rather to promote the economic and social well-being of the country, or parts of it, in furtherance of the wider public good.”

“Nothing in the submissions offered here persuades the commissioner that the ministers’ interests should be regarded as especially ‘commercial’ here.

“There might be prejudice to the public purse if the guarantee were to be called up, and disclosure might (although the commissioner considers this less likely) prejudice the negotiation of future guarantees, but neither of these considerations suggests an interest that should properly be considered commercial (as opposed to more widely economic, or social).”.

A summary of an August 2017 meeting between First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, Mr Ewing, and Mary McAllan, the government’s director of economic development, warned the government had “reached the very limits of what was possible”.

The briefing also noted “the potential to be overexposed to one company – a company that we know is on an aggressive expansion drive elsewhere”.

Lobbying records also show Mr Ewing and representatives from GFG Alliance discussed the possibility of upsizing the projected output of GFG’s never-to-be-built alloy wheel factory from two million wheels a year to three million at a dinner in March 2018.

The Scottish Government provided a guarantee of £586 million to Sanjeev Gupta’s company GFG Alliance as part of the company’s purchase of the Lochaber smelter. The figure was made public for the first time after a two-year transparency battle.

The revelation surfaced after ministers were slapped on the wrist for withholding the information from the public, with opposition leaders labelling it a “dodgy deal” and claiming the SNP was “desperate to avoid scrutiny”.

The agreement saw the Scottish Government guarantee 25 years of power purchases by Gupta’s company from another business owned by his father, with the guarantee funding the purchase of the aluminium smelter.

The guarantee allowed Greensill Capital to transform the guarantee into nearly £300m of debt with a credit rating equivalent to UK sovereign bonds to be created, funding the purchase.

The deal with the Scottish Government was provided when the smelter in Lochaber was purchased by GFG Alliance alongside two hydropower plants from Rio Tinto in 2016.

GFG Alliance also promised the construction of an alloy wheels factory near the smelter, which was scrapped last year in favour of a £94m recycled aluminium factory, which could have created 2,000 jobs. Earlier this year the government admitted just 50 additional jobs had been created by the deal.

Gupta’s company hit the skids earlier this year due to the collapse of Greensill Capital, which was partially blamed as Gupta’s company began to default on the more than $5bn (£3.7bn) of debt GFG Alliance had borrowed from Greensill.

The guarantee was reportedly provided, covering annual amounts between £14m and £32m, in return for a fee initially valued at £21.4m, but later written down to zero with a £33m provision due to the potential exposure of the deal.

GFG Alliance said: “The Lochaber aluminium smelter is a profitable operation, and GFG Alliance’s commitment to invest in a new recycling and aluminium billet plant there will secure the future of the operations, create new high-quality employment in the area and provide opportunities for the local supply chain.”

Ministers were also criticised by Scotland’s information watchdog for failing to release the total value of the deal after they claimed their commercial interests would be harmed by its release.

In a decision notice published in mid-October, Scottish Information Commissioner Daren Fitzhenry criticised the use of commercial interest as a defence, saying it was unlikely the release of the information would prejudice the negotiation of future guarantees. He said:

“The ministers do not, in general, operate in a commercial environment and the commissioner does not consider them to be doing so simply because they are providing funding to, or guaranteeing the liabilities of, business.

“They do not undertake such activities as participants in the market with the businesses concerned, in pursuit of profit, but rather to promote the economic and social well-being of the country, or parts of it, in furtherance of the wider public good.”

“Nothing in the submissions offered here persuades the commissioner that the ministers’ interests should be regarded as especially ‘commercial’ here.

“There might be prejudice to the public purse if the guarantee were to be called up, and disclosure might (although the commissioner considers this less likely) prejudice the negotiation of future guarantees, but neither of these considerations suggests an interest that should properly be considered commercial (as opposed to more widely economic, or social).”.

A summary of an August 2017 meeting led by First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, warned the government had “reached the very limits of what was possible” and noted: “the potential to be overexposed to one company – a company that we know is on an aggressive expansion drive elsewhere”.

Sep 2024: Panic button pressed £585 million government guarantee called in as Guptas business collapses. More incompetence

Click to access Decision164-2024.pdf

There’s not just a ferry fiasco – the Gupta scandal is even bigger

Global Muslim Brotherhood

By gmbwatch on January 17, 2015

1. What is the Global Muslim Brotherhood?

Formed in 1928, from then, the Egyptian Brotherhood dominated Muslim society actively promoting politicaI islamism spawninga number of radical leaders determined to control the political agenda of the countries in which they operated.

A number of Arab and Western Nations

Far less known is the existence of a global network of individuals and organizations that developed as Muslim Brotherhood members dispersed to other countries while fleeing the periodic crackdowns on the organization in Egypt.

Many of these Muslim Brothers (Ikhwan) settled in Europe and the United States where they went on to found what have become some of the most prominent Islamic organizations in their new home countries. Once established, these organizations began seeking legitimacy and have worked to influence and control the development of Islamic discourse and political activity in their respective countries. Less publicly, they are almost always associated with fundamentalism, anti-Semitism, and support for Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and even Hezbollah. While claiming to disavow Al-Qaeda linked terrorism, the Ikhwan are at best lukewarm in their condemnation of Islamist violence and commonly issue statements justifying and supporting such violence. When compared to the Egyptian organization, there has been relatively little scrutiny of the network that is referred to here as the Global Muslim Brotherhood. This network has become far more important to the Islamist movement worldwide than the Egyptian organization, which until recently had been largely confined to activities inside Egypt– where its members were under constant government surveillance and control until the fall of the Mubarak government in 2011.

The Global Muslim Brotherhood has been organized in the United States since 1963, when the Muslim Student Association (MSA) was established by Brotherhood members fleeing their home countries. Key figures in the MSA, as well as others linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, went on to form numerous other organizations, many of which have been recently identified by the US government in court documents as part of the U.S Brotherhood. The Global Muslim Brotherhood has been present in Europe since 1960 when Said Ramadan, the son-in-law of Hassan Al-Banna, founded a mosque in Munich. Since that time, Brotherhood organizations have been established in almost all of the EU countries as well as many non-EU countries such as Russia and Turkey. Many of these organizations have banded together into an EU-level lobbying group known as the Federation of Islamic Organizations of Europe (FIOE), based in Brussels and which includes some 26 European Muslim Brotherhood organizations as well as being the parent body for other pan-European Brotherhood bodies such as the European Council For Fatwa and Research (ECFR). The Global Muslim Brotherhood also includes important Saudi institutions, many of which were founded by Muslim Brothers who settled in the Kingdom. These include the Muslim World League (MWL) and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), both of which were created to propagate Saudi ‘Wahhabi’ Islam, a conservative version of Islam that teaches that the only true form of the religion is that which it is believed was practiced centuries ago. These US, European, and Saudi organizations, as well as Islamic organizations in other parts of the world, operate as a coherent network– sharing similar ideology, backgrounds, funding, and institutional links. They hold numerous conferences year after year, attended by the same core group of individuals.

While much remains to be learned about how the Global Muslim Brotherhood is coordinated and led, US court documents released during the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing trial indicate a degree of structure previously unknown. In addition, one individual holds a position of such esteem and influence within the Global Muslim Brotherhood that he is referred to here as the leader of the network. Sheikh Youssef Qaradawi is a highly influential theologian living in Qatar who also heads the European Council for Fatwa and Research and appears on a weekly Al Jazeera television program. Sheikh Qaradawi first rose to prominence through his participation on the editorial board of Al-Dawa magazine, an Egyptian publication that was allowed to circulate during the regime of Anwar Sadat and which was largely financed by money coming from Saudi Arabia. The Al-Dawa editorial board was composed largely of Muslim Brothers who had fallen out with the Brotherhood Supreme Guide over their willingness to cooperate with the Egyptian regime.

2. Is there any other evidence for the existence of a Global Muslim Brotherhood?

Several of the leaders of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood itself have acknowledged the existence of a Global Muslim Brotherhood. In July 2007, the then Supreme Guide of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood explained:

This blessed movement founded by our martyr Imam- Allah have mercy on him- ensued a huge movement which is present in more than seventy countries all over the world, and is still spreading and bearing fruits.

Also in July 2007, Kamal al Helbawi, the MB’s former official spokesman in the West, said in a newspaper interview:

Generally speaking, no country is devoid of the MB, whether large or small, Arab or international. In the West, there is an Islamic movement that follows al Banna, but there are also others that have different references.”

In June 2008, the first Deputy chairman of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was asked about the “international Muslim Brotherhood and replied:

There are entities that exist in many countries all over the world. These entities have the same ideology, principle and objectives but they work in different circumstances and different contexts. So, it is reasonable to have decentralization in action so that every entity works according to its circumstances and according to the problems it is facing and in their framework.

Sinn Féin, fronting Republican aspirations in the 1918 general election, stood on a unified platform pledging not to take their seats were they to be elected to Westminster but to set up an alternative Irish parliament in Dublin. The party received a massive endorsement winning 73 of 105 seats and acted on the wishes of the majority of the electorate. Westminster immediately imposed Martial Law and all of its accompanying iniquities leading to the Irish War of Independence and subsequent creation of the Irish Free State in 1922. The Irish were free of the invidious colonial bondage of Westminster.

If the 2026 Scottish General Election returns a Nationalist majority and an independence referendum is refused Scottish Nationalist MP’s should be withdrawn from participating in the business the House of Commons and any other associated activities such as committee work. Their constituency work would be unaffected.

In Dec 2019 the £650m planning application to construct a 3000-home Durieshill village in Stirlingshire was approved after a meeting between Senior Springfield staff and Nicola Sturgeon which she failed to declare.

Senior Springfield staff also lobbied the First Minister in Perth in January 2019 but there is no mention of the talks in her official diary. And several other appointments between Springfield and senior SNP ministers were also not recorded.

This despite the Holyrood code of conduct stating: “Private Offices should arrange for the basic facts of formal meetings between ministers and outside interest groups to be recorded, setting out the reasons for the meeting, the names of those attending and the interests represented.”

Sturgeon was previously accused of cronyism in 2015 after announcing an overhaul of the planning system following a campaign by multi-millionaire Adam Springfield.

80% of men are work-centred

Men are dominant in the labour market, politics and other competitive activities, because they are prepared to prioritise their jobs over lifestyle choices. In consequence they are more likely to survive, and become high achievers.

20% of women are work-centred

Women remain a minority, despite their influx into higher education and professional and managerial occupations. Such women are focused on competitive activities in the public sphere, in careers, sport, politics, or the arts. Family life is fitted around their work, and many remain childless by choice, even when married. Qualifications and training are obtained as a career investment.

In order to be assured of good governance the gender make up of the Scottish Government should be 24 male and 6 female. It is 18 female and 12 male. The imbalance needs to be corrected.

In recent years Sturgeon oft repeated claims that sex discrimination is the primary source of unfairness in the labour market and encouraged by an ever increasing range of lobbyist groups she forced radical feminist agendas on Scottish society; eg the equal opportunities act, family friendly employment, sex discrimination and transgender recognition.

But her relentless pursuit of a radical feminist agenda, recruiting from a small group of work centred women backfired since its aims and aspirations defied logic and reality. The talent just isn’t there.

Unionist, primarily English born incomers to Scotland greatly aided by a similarly minded Scottish press, BBC (Scotland), other media outlets, Labour, Tory and Liberal Democratic politicians spurned the Scottish electorate in favour of “beating the “Lambeg drum” in support of Westminster.

The referendum outcome for Scots who dared challenge the authority of Westminster was the brutal imposition of financial austerity measures rendering many families unable to cope with significantly reduced incomes and ever increasing prices and in harmony with the aforestated cruelty Westminster politicians reduced welfare finance to Scotland by around £3 billion annually.

And yet, according to the polls another referendum might produce the same result!! Scots must be mad, stupid or brow beaten beyond saving. But hang on a minute!! Confining the voter base to those born in Scotland might balance the odds in favour of independence!!

Alec launched a brutal broadside against Swinney as he accused him of “making independence impossible” in the General Election. And he also claimed that the First Minister was “reprising” his failed 2003 Holyrood campaign where he lost eight seats.

Alec was reacting to an interview Swinney did with ITV News in which he confessed that he would support Devo Max instead of gaining a second independence referendum.

The SNP strategy is to win a majority of the seats at the next General Election and then plead with the Prime Minister to give them the power to hold another vote. but Westminster has already rejected the notion of such an event.

Swinney was asked whether he would support more powers for Holyrood instead of a referendum, and admitted he would.

He said: “I have never, my record says that I have never resisted strengthening of the powers of the Scottish Parliament. I was part of the Smith Commission which brought more power, the very tax powers that you’ve asked me about, came from the Smith Commission, of which I was a member. So I will always try to build the powers of the Scottish Parliament. I’m a believer in independence, I think independence is the answer for Scotland, but I will always work constructively to strengthen the powers of the Scottish Parliament. The real challenge we face is over the last few years since Brexit the powers of the Scottish Parliament have been eroded by the UK Government.”

He was asked if he wanted to see these extra powers being offered in the Labour manifesto and confirmed he did, and wanted Scots to “have the opportunity to decide their own future.” But the interview was highlighted by Alec Salmond as proof that the SNP had given up the push for Scexit.

Alec said: “Now we know why independence is off the SNP ballot paper. These interviews from Swinney are so wrong on so many levels. All experience shows that the ONLY circumstances when Westminster offers more powers for Scotland, is when they are frightened of independence and since the SNP are not campaigning for independence then Labour have no need to concede anything. As Swinney told Nick Robinson, of the BBC, the SNP is campaigning for a ‘democratic effect’ forcing Starmer to permit a referendum to which he already knows the answer is “no”.

A timely reminder

In 2003, Swinney led the SNP to a calamatous result in the Holyrood election, losing eight seats and seeing the vote share drop by 4.9% which was the beginning of the end for his reign as he was forced to resign after another bad showing in the European Parliament elections and was replaced by Mr Salmond. Luddite as he is Swinney is destined to repeat his mistakes condemnimg Scots to many more years of Westminster abuse. Thank you Mr Swinney.

Summarised from an article written by the political correspondent David Walker,

Operation Diem – The Crown Office. The “sisting” process. Bypassing the Judicial Review.

D.C.S. Lesley Boal, was appointed lead officer of a Police Scotland enquiry furnished with unlimited financial resources to establish whether there was any criminality on the part of Mr Salmond. She had command of a team of 14 full-time experienced police detectives. The team carried out 386 interviews over a period of 2 years at the end of which Alex was charged with 14 offences of which he was subsequently cleared in the High Court.

Chief ­Constable Iain Livingstone, told Holyrood’s Public Audit Committee that: “A small dedicated team worked on Operation Diem from Fettes Police Station, Edinburgh, between August 2018 and April 2020. It was comprised of seven ­officers from August 2018 rising to a maximum of 14 during the months between October 2018 and July 2019 before steadily reducing in 2020. The indicative cost of this staffing ­profile is just over £810,000. In addition, there were non-staff costs captured in respect of operation Diem totalling just over £24,000.” And his report proved to be wishful thinking. The final cost was over £1million and only covered the police investigation.