Thread by @DeanMThomson

What's all this about Fergus Ewing then?

A sorry story of unaccountability, dodgy deals, and the stench of sleaze amid a breached ministerial code.

Shady backroom deals spilling across Scottish and Westminster governments. And the current official silence is damning.

[1/20]

➡️Doing Deals

At the heart of all of this are a complex set of financial deals struck between ScotGov, Sanjeev Gupta and Lex Greensill.

Hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers money is now at serious risk due to these deals.
[2/20]

Gupta secured massive state support to buy metal & power plants in ­Lanarkshire & Highlands.

But his firm GFG Alliance is in crisis. This is because his big-money backer Greensil Capital has already collapsed.
[3/20]

➡️The Cail Bruich Dinner-Date

Rural Economy Secretary Fergus Ewing met Gupta & Lex Greensil (the name of a comic-book villain?) in 2017.

Over a dinner in Glasgow West-End's Cail Bruich official gov business was discussed but no ­officials present & no notes were taken
[4/20]

Scottish taxpayers are now potentially on the hook to the tune of hundreds of millions due to the complex financial deals struck; but this 2017 meeting is shrouded in near total mystery.
[5/20]

➡️Not Smelling Right

A Freedom of Information Request (FOI) reveals that no correspondence could be found one month on either side of this 2017 dinner-appointment.

But there is more...
[6/20]

Alongside Greensil, Gupta & Ewing at the 2017 dinner was Jay Hambro & Tim Haywood.

Haywood's presence is particularly interesting as he has since been suspended from his job as a city fund ­manager at GAM Holdings.

But wait...
[7/20]

Turns out no civil servants were present, so there is no official record of what these men all discussed in Cail Bruich. None. Nothing. Except...

"themes discussion" were apparently written down somewhere by GFG (Mr Gupta's firm)
[8/20]

"themes of discussion" is so incredibly vague, opaque and self-evidently self-serving that it can be dismissed as a credible account of anything at all.

After all Mr Gupta's lot are not objective civil servants calmly recording the affair in the public interest.
[9/20]

Oh, and it gets even more murky.

We still do not know who even paid for the dinner back in 2017. Nobody seems to remember who paid for it.

Not Mr Ewing, not Mr Gupta, nor even controversial banker Mr Greensill.

'I can't recall' is the epitaph of this SNP gov't.
[10/20]

➡️The Ministerial Code

The ministerial code: “meetings on official business should normally be arranged through private offices”. It also says a “private secretary or official should be present for all discussions relating to Government business”.
[11/20]

And...“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”.
[12/20]

➡️No minutes were taken
➡️No civil servants were present
➡️No official correspondence to be had a month either side of the meeting

I put it to all of you that Fergus Ewing is in flagrant breach of the ministerial code relating to that dinner back in 2017.
[13/20]

➡️What is at risk?

So how much money are we poor bloody taxpayers potentially the hook for then?

£360 million.

And let's not forget that 100 workers at the Highland plant and those of thousands of UK steel workers are at risk too.
[14/20]

➡️Greensil, David Cameron, and shady deals across Westminster & Holyrood.

If you thought this couldn't get any more sleazy, you're wrong. It actually can.

We still haven't talked about controversial banker Lex Greensill yet...
[15/20]

It came out last week that Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak tried to smooth the way for Greensill to gain special access to ­emergency Covid loans.

This was after ­lobbying from former prime minister David Cameron.
[16/20]

And this is all quite interesting because David Cameron allowed Greensill into the heart of government as an adviser while PM...only to go work for him after leaving No10.
[17/20]

So this Mr Greensill is tied to Cameron, WM government & also the SNP government in Holyrood.

And all of the headaches for Ms Sturgeon's government comes from the fact that Greensill Capital went belly-up recently; and he had been the primary financial backer for Gupta.
[18/20]

The SNP's claims "This meeting [2017] was properly recorded within government and opposition attempts to make ­mischief around this issue are utterly baseless."

But we know now this is flagrantly untrue.
[19/20]

Willie Rennie has a point: "The collapse of Greensill has exposed a shady network of backroom deals across the Scottish and UK governments."

It is time for a full blown inquiry into Greensill, Gupta-Greensill-ScotGov deal, and the Cameron lobbying for Greensill
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