Former East Lothian council leader, Norman ‘nae pals’ Murray was hoping to take Susan Deacon’s former Edinburgh East & Musselburgh seat on May 3rd. Unfortunately, because word got round that “A vote for Murray is a vote for Nolan” and posters with that appeared in windows all over Edinburgh East, Murray and the Labour vote was totally decimated in the constituency with a huge swing to the SNP.
It now transpires that the electorate were 100% right in suspisions of nae pals Murray. Not only did he give the 300K pay-off to his friend the council chief executive and actively supported that decision throughout the campaign, we now find that the council that he was leader of were giving even larger sums to their ‘friends’.
They agreed to a £9 million “cheap loan” to fund the controversial expansion of a Musselburgh racecourse which now turns out to break European competition rules.Â
The development was pushed through by the council’s former Labour leadership despite strong local objections.
But now The Scotsman can reveal that officials at the Scottish Executive concluded that the low-cost loan appears to breach anti-competition regulations governing state subsidies of businesses.
A letter from an Executive official to Susan Deacon, the former MSP for the area, states the £9 million loan meets the five criteria set out by the EU to judge what constitutes state aid.
The loan, which was proposed to the council by the then director of finance and IT, Alex McCrorie and current front runner for the chief execuive job should be putting some former labour councillors and council officials before M’lud up there in Parliament Square.
As Viper217 puts it:
At the Integrity & Governance handicap today at Musselburgh we have coming up on the outside corruption and decency neck and neck, we are into the last straight and it’s corruption that seems to have the legs, and at the finish it’s corruption that takes it by a mile.
Did any of the punters expect any other result in a Labour Administered District?
I know the bookies didn’t!
Nuff said!
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