Probe into contracts for cronies in the Highlands

from Sunday Herald, 20 August, 2000

ONE of Scotland's leading economic development agencies is being investigated over allegations of cronyism and financial mismanagement after a director of a local enterprise company resigned in protest.

The chief executive of Highlands and Island Enterprise (HIE), Iain Robertson, announced last month that he would be leaving in October to become director for corporate development for Morrison plc, an Edinburgh-based construction company. In the last five years HIE has awarded Morrison contracts worth £12.7 million, including £9.6m for building the controversial railway up Cairngorm.

Now Alan Blackshaw, a former senior civil servant and a leading expert on mountain recreation, has quit as a director of Moray Badenoch and Strathspey Enterprise, the company in the HIE network which covers the Cairngorms. In his four-page resignation letter, seen by the Sunday Herald, he said his decision had been prompted by the "considerable difficulties" raised by Robertson's departure.