A special cross-party committee of MSPs has made a series of stinging criticisms and recommendations in a detailed 192-page report into the botched Scottish government inquiry into harassment complaints against Alex Salmond. Those findings include:
• Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister, did mislead Holyrood about her dealings with Salmond because she denied giving him the impression she could intervene in the government inquiry on Salmond’s behalf when they met at her home on 2 April 2018, despite witness evidence she did suggest doing so.
That was a “potential breach” of the ministerial code, a majority of committee members said, but they added that investigating code breaches was a matter for the independent review by James Hamilton. On Monday, Hamilton ruled she did not breach the code.
• It was unable to reach a conclusion on whether the name of a complainer was leaked by one of Sturgeon’s aides to Geoff Aberdein, Salmond’s former chief of staff, in March 2018 but said “any breach of confidentiality is a serious matter and that confidentiality is key to any complaints process”.
• It was unable to decide whether Sturgeon had misled parliament about why she met Aberdein in her office on 29 March 2018 and whether she was told then that Salmond was under investigation. While there were contradictions between her evidence and Salmond’s about that event, and while Salmond’s evidence had been confirmed by others, there was no definite proof of what was said that day.
• There was scepticism among a majority of committee members about Sturgeon’s statement on oath that she had been unaware of allegations of sexually inappropriate conduct by Salmond before November 2017, when Sky News flagged allegations about incidents at Edinburgh airport 10 years earlier. Salmond strongly denies the claims of inappropriate behaviour.
A majority of MSPs said they found “it hard to believe the first minister had no knowledge of any concerns about inappropriate behaviour on the part of Mr Salmond prior to November 2017. If she did have such knowledge, then she should have acted upon it. If she did have such knowledge, then she has misled the committee.”
• It was “inappropriate” for Sturgeon to continue talking to Salmond about the inquiry after their first meeting at her home on 2 April 2018 “given the sensitivities of the matter”. They had five conversations overall and exchanged WhatsApp messages between April and July 2018.
Sturgeon should have immediately told Leslie Evans, the Scottish government’s chief civil servant, the pair had met and then refused to discuss the matter with Salmond again.
• The committee strongly hints that Evans, the Scottish government’s permanent secretary, should consider resigning for overseeing repeated and foreseeable failures in the government inquiry. She was guilty of an “individual failing as significant” as the government’s corporate failures, the committee said unanimously.
• The committee “concludes that the Scottish government was responsible from an early stage for a serious, substantial and entirely avoidable situation that resulted in a prolonged, expensive and unsuccessful defence of the petition”.
“The committee finds that this state of affairs is unacceptable by an organisation such as the Scottish government and that those responsible should be held accountable.”
• The Scottish government thwarted and “significantly impeded” the committee’s inquiry by being very late in providing documents, significantly redacting legal papers. That was “simply unacceptable”, it said.
• The government’s “extremely late release” of its legal advice, despite repeated promises from Sturgeon and Evans they would cooperate fully with the inquiry, “has had perhaps the most significant impact” on the inquiry, because it was critical to the committee’s investigation. The failure to release that material until the very last minute damaged public confidence.
• It was “dismayed” that senior officials did not see that appointing Judith Mackinnon as investigating officer, given her extensive prior contact with the complainers, was “problematic and could lead to a challenge”.
• The leak of the internal government inquiry’s findings to the Record newspaper in August 2018 was an unacceptable breach of confidentiality and extremely serious, so whoever was to blame for the leak “should be held to account for their actions”.
