A dirty business?

On a cold winter’s morning in February last year, Craig Kirby, a veterinary surgeon from the Food Standards Agency, made his routine journey to work through the winding country lanes south of the tiny Essex hamlet of Little Warley.

Kirby, 29, a vet with the FSA’s Meat Hygiene Service, was already preoccupied with his day ahead at the Cheale Meats abattoir where he was due to inspect over a hundred pigs selected for slaughter later that afternoon. At around 9:30am, as Kirby carried out his routine inspection of the swine, he found signs of the virulent foot-and-mouth disease in 27 animals. Kirby instantly alerted the authorities and closed down the site, but the symptoms had been detected too late. A fortnight later, as the number of cases at farms and abattoirs around the country soared to 100, the government called in the army to deal with the biggest animal cull Europe had ever seen.

Five hundred miles north of the outbreak, in the tiny Stirlingshire village of Blairlogie, Scots businessman Malcolm Snowie watched the events unfold with studied interest. Snowie, 42, the eldest of four brothers who ran Stirlingshire-based waste management firm, Snowie Ltd, had started his company as a sewage transport firm ten years earlier on the strength of profits from his farm in the foothills of the Ochils.

During the BSE crisis in 1999, Snowie Ltd had successfully diversified into waste disposal - providing airtight containers for the disposal of thousands of animal carcasses. Like his brothers, Malcolm Snowie knew the fact that his firm could provide a fleet of leak-proof lorries to move dead animals meant they were likely to be shortlisted by the government to help stop the spread of foot-and-mouth north of the border.

The Scots businessman was also aware that the situation demanded quick action, but knew the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food operated a protracted competitive tendering process to ensure value for money for the taxpayer.

Anticipating the likelihood of being invited to enter a competitive quote, Snowie called a board meeting at the firm’s East Gogar headquarters, attended by his brothers, Alistair, 38, Gordon, 36, and Euan, 33, to prepare their proposal.

Yet the competitive tendering process never came. From the outset Snowie would be one of the only firms in the frame for the job and within weeks of the outbreak the small family company had secured the contract to carry out the lion’s share of the foot-and-mouth clear-up, not only in Scotland but in Northern Ireland and the north-east of England.

In a further boost for the firm, Snowie Ltd had not only secured the contract to transport dead animal carcasses across the UK; they had also been handed the task of burning and burying carcasses and managing burial sites to ensure there was no pollution.

By the end of the foot-and-mouth crisis on 14 January 2002, almost 11 months after the first case of the disease was confirmed, Snowie Ltd had earned a staggering 37,751,894 worth of government contracts - excluding VAT.

Over the past 12 months the rapid growth of the family-owned Stirling firm has been nothing short of phenomenal, with the company trebling staff to 500 and expanding its waste management empire across Europe and the UK.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Snowie brothers themselves have been enjoying the benefits of their new-found riches, buying up their own yacht firm, Northern Yacht Charters Ltd, and expanding their property portfolio to include a castle in Killin and Boquhan House, a grand mansion on the outskirts of Kippen.

To date, Malcolm Snowie himself has directorships in 11 other companies, including Northern Hydro Seed, whose last published profits were 660,000.

Alistair and Gordon have directorships in six of the firm’s companies. And the youngest of the four, Euan, has directorships in Bio Solid Services Ltd, Bio Lime Ltd, Bio Recycling Ltd and Bio Grow Ltd. For the Snowies, business couldn’t be better.

At Stirling County Rugby Club, where Euan Snowie is a director, the brothers are often seen in the boardroom and locally their profile has soared with Malcolm Snowie recently taking a role in Stirling’s failed campaign to gain city status. In the pubs around Clackmannanshire, the Mercedes-driving brothers - who all describe themselves as farmers - are the biggest talking point around.

Yet behind the apparent success of the Stirling-based firm lies a series of controversies that could yet see Snowie’s integral role in the foot-and-mouth crisis placed under serious scrutiny. In Scotland some MSPs are already calling for a public enquiry into the firm.

The Scotsman revealed last November that Euan Snowie had gifted the Labour Party 5,000 only months after his firm secured the biggest government contract in their history and before they were granted business worth millions more.

The plot thickened last month after Snowie’s biggest northern rival, Armstrongs Transport in Wigan, finally spoke out after the government admitted it had awarded millions of pounds of business to Snowie Ltd without submitting it to competitive tendering.

Lord Whitty, the rural affairs minister, admitted in the Commons that his department had bypassed the process because of the overriding need to act quickly over clearing away carcasses in northern England.

David Cheers, a spokesman for Armstrongs, told The Scotsman recently: "If we had been contacted we could have done the work without any problems, but we didn’t get a look-in. We are one of the big four companies in the region who all could have done the work. When the department for rural affairs says that in the early days of the outbreak everything had to be done in a rush and that is why Snowie was chosen, it is ridiculous. If it had wanted to contact the other companies it could have faxed job lists over and it could have been done in an afternoon."

Not surprisingly MPs have already drawn parallels between the row and the controversy surrounding the recent award of a 32 million contract for a smallpox vaccine to PowderJect, a pharmaceutical firm owned by Paul Drayson, who has regularly donated money to the Labour party.

The practice of awarding haulage contracts without tendering during the foot-and-mouth epidemic was highlighted in a report from the National Audit Office (NAO), which said it led to the government paying top rates for services.

The NAO report into the cost of the foot-and-mouth outbreak states that more than 1.1 billion was spent on "goods and services to eradicate the disease" across the UK. The NAO report also revealed that the biggest single payment was made to Snowie Ltd.

The Snowies themselves have kept a low profile over the controversy and recently issued a terse statement through their newly appointed press spokesman dismissing suggestions that the firm was trying to buy influence. He said: "If you have read the NAO report you will see that we gave good value. In fact the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs continues to retain the company in a contract dealing with the effects of Foot-and-Mouth."

Yet Conservative MP George Osborne, a member of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, which recently examined the circumstances of the Snowie Ltd contracts, believes the government did not achieve value for taxpayers’ money during the foot-and-mouth crisis; largely on the basis that contracts were "not properly put out to tender".

Osborne said: "It certainly seems pretty suspicious that a company that got such lucrative contracts happens to be one that gives money to the Labour party. The priority for the government was speed - they needed big contractors to transport and dispose of animals, and the priority was to get the job done. But when you accelerate the awarding of contracts, you have got to be absolutely sure that there is no suspicion over how they are awarded and you have to be extremely careful about being above board."

To make matters worse for the firm it is not only Snowie’s political links that are causing them to come under scrutiny; their environmental record is also being questioned.

During the foot-and-mouth outbreak, the company took dead animals to a mass grave near Lockerbie and to rendering factories and was also the main contractor dealing with the mass burial in Cumbria. But its management of such sites was called into question when 900 animals were buried at the wrong location at Tow Law, Country Durham, and had to be reburied. The company said it had been given bad advice.

But Snowie continues to be one of the main operators for such work, and earlier this month they were awarded a transport contract for disposal of carcasses in Cumbria, beating five other companies in a tendering process.

On three occasions the firm has also been fined for breaching environmental standards. Snowie Ltd was prosecuted in February and October 2000 and June 2001 for breaking waste regulations.

In October 2000, it pleaded guilty to causing liquid waste to enter a tributary of the Cadger Burn, near Blairingone. The tributary feeds into the Gartmorn Dam, which supplies Alloa’s drinking water. The company was found guilty and fined 1,000.

Earlier in that same year, the firm was fined 3,000 after admitting it allowed distilling waste from breweries to run into a tributary of the River Teith, in Doune, Perthshire. In June 2001, Snowie was fined 5,000 after injecting waste into land at a farm south of Saline, West Fife, in a manner that the Scottish Environment Protection Agency claimed was likely to cause pollution.

The company has also been at the centre of controversy for spreading abattoir waste on land in Clackmannanshire. That practice is not illegal and is not related to Snowie’s fines, but local people have campaigned hard against it.

According to the SNP environment spokesman, Bruce Crawford, Snowie’s environmental record has been open to serious question. He says: "Snowie have been repeatedly fined by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency yet they won the contract for part of the clean-up of Scotland’s largest ever environmental disaster. The fact that they made a donation to the Labour party and have won not only the foot-and-mouth contract but contracts with three Labour-run water authority quangos leaves them open to scrutiny. They may sniff at 5,000 but it’s still a donation to Labour and they still do regular business with the Labour government. It is time for Labour to clean up its sleazy act and stop favouring its political friends."

Scottish Labour remain indignant about accusations over their relationship with Snowie Ltd.

A party spokesman says: "Big donations have no effect whatsoever on how the Labour party conducts itself. If people have any evidence that this is not the case, they should come forward with it rather than throwing around unsubstantiated allegations of wrongdoing."

Yet Scottish Tory rural affairs spokesman Alex Fergusson claims the Snowie issue is far from over: "The real issue here is whether the government attained what they would call "best value" from the companies they contracted to carry out the clean up in the aftermath of Foot-and-Mouth. While I cannot criticise how successfully they carried out the job, in the case of Snowie Ltd I cannot see how best value could’ve been attained when there was no competitive tendering process and they were simply handed the role. How could DEFRA have gotten best value from Snowie when there was no other company bid to compare their quote with? This firm effectively had a monopoly on a 38 million government contract. The deal wasn’t exactly done on a level playing field according to the strict rules of tendering practice."

According to Snowie’s official spokesman, Ross Muir, the family are fast becoming a victim of their own success. He says: "The family are fed up with [talk of] links to the Labour party. If you think for one second we were given a multi-million contract on the strength of a 5,000 donation to the Labour party from Euan Snowie then you are badly mistaken. If they guarantee 37 million-worth of business for a four figure donation I’m sure Snowie and any other firm would ask you where they had to send the next cheque."