Letter: Gathering loan

In learning of Sir John Elvidge's testimony to the Public Audit Committee's enquiry into the Gathering (your report, 7 October), one has to wonder what other highly questionable decisions were made while Mr Elvidge led the civil service in Scotland, and, more importantly, one has to ask whether his own political affiliations were, and still are, too closely linked to those of the SNP administration.

It is farcical he could state to the committee that the granting of a secret loan of 180,000 to the Gathering without proper evaluation of the risk was not unusual, and that he was relaxed that he was not personally informed of the decision to risk public funds until things went horribly wrong only three months later.

The Public Audit Committee must call for publication of the details of all the loans to which Sir John refers, together with the amounts which eventually had to be written off in the same way as the loan to the Gathering.

It surely also beggars belief that Sir John seriously considers that the need for due diligence in the granting of any loan would be diminished where the prospective borrower had admitted that they were in financial difficulties.

As a career civil servant one could accept that Sir John is perhaps divorced from the real world, but we can only hope he is not spending his retirement lecturing in business finance.

Most worrying of all, Sir John considers the amount lost by taxpayers to be small, and he also seems to consider it par for the course that some private companies get into trading difficulties; presumably he includes the many small private companies who provided goods and services to the Gathering in good faith, but who may have taken a different view had the knowledge of the Gathering's financial problems not been deliberately suppressed by Alex Salmond's administration.

Bill Goodall

Baird Drive

Edinburgh

There is a perfect example of juxtaposition in two separate articles in Thursday's Scotsman.

The first example article tells of how, when it emerges that a black asylum seeker may have inadvertently been in receipt of 20 or so of family credits, the full force of officialdom swings into action and the poor woman and her family are to be deported back to Mugabe's Zimbabwe forthwith, without being given the chance to repay the money.

Yet when a white Lord of the realm gets a 180,000 secret government loan, gives most of it to his chums, then goes bust without repaying a penny, we are told by another titled chappie - and our First Minister - that this is "nothing unusual".

In fact he says it is "perfectly normal", so don't worry because 180,000 is a tiny amount in the grand scheme of things.

One law for the rich and another for the poor, or what?

Tom Minogue

Victoria Terrace

Dunferminline