Edinburgh Sucks! | Lothian Buses

Andrew Burns

Lothian Buses - The Secret Society

By The Basa ⋅ August 2, 2005 ⋅

It seems that this morning’s revelation by the Glasgow Herald (click here) is not the only secret at Lothian Buses. Lothian Buses is a public limited company (plc) and it seems the only thing public about the company is the way it keeps pulling in the profits.

Trying to find out any information at all from the bus company is frightening. A quick visit to the website to find out who is on the board that signed off on the Chief Executive’s 31% pay rise gives no company information at all. In fact trying to get information from their press centre is very, very difficult indeed considering that to contact anyone through it takes the user to a free web script written by our old friend Matt Wright but unfortunately that script is hosted on Scotland.Net which redirects to ScotlandOnline.com and the user who obviously controls the account on Scotland.Net - a certain “smiffy” seems to have gone AWOL and left the journalists in the dark.

It is strange that this company who made a pre-tax profit of nearly £5.4m to December 31, 2004, cannot afford a web developer to write a script to allow a form to go to a press representative but they can spend £187,000 on a chief executive.

After a number of phone calls and being transferred around quite a few times, I eventually got through to someone in their marketing department who wouldn’t give me the names of the board members but said they would have to ask the permission of one of the directors to release this PUBLIC information. I am still waiting on the callback a few hours later.

A source close to the Chief Executive’s office told us this morning that “they’re no very happy aboot that” when we mentioned the publicity about Renilson’s £187,000 and Ian Coupar, the company’s marketing director is making himself as scarce as rocking horse dung.

So our question remains, who is on the board that OK’d the £187,000? - more importantly, which labour councillors are selling their union colleagues down the river?

UPDATE:

After in excess of 6 calls today to Lothian Buses and at least six promises to be called back there has been nothing from the company. It really is a secret society.