Concerns have been raised over a partnership between City of Glasgow College and a mysterious hospitality institution in India.
The college, which is seeking to lay off 100 staff due to a budget deficit, operates a number of commercial projects around the world with its website touting "over 120 global partner organisations".
For the year 2021-22 accounts showed £2.7m spending on corporate development.
In August 2022, the college announced a partnership with the Scottish Institute of Hospitality Science to provide qualifications in hotel, restaurant, and bar operations; professional cookery; and air cabin crew operations.
Speaking at the time Carla Gethin, director of business partnerships, City of Glasgow College, said: "India’s young population is a valuable asset to economic growth and we see the potential to support capacity building and human resource development through partnerships with Indian partners.
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"We are therefore delighted to announce our partnership with the Scottish Institute in Hospitality Sciences to offer training designed to meet the aspirations of students while providing the supply of skilled manpower through excellent, innovative vocational and technical training."
However, an investigation by The Herald has unearthed a number of concerns with the business.
The Facebook page linked to the Scottish Institute of Hospitality Science has not posted since September 2022 and is populated entirely by what appear to be stock images.
The home page of its website contains an image of a glass-fronted building, which is a royalty-free image hosted on a website called Freepik under 'office building exterior'.
Elsewhere on the site an image of what appears to be a campus can be found on the website of Ahmed Alsadek, a web designer based in the UAE, with his own design for a company called North Wedges Tailoring over the top. A reverse image search suggests it is another stock image.
Under the news and events section of the website, the most recent story is the announcement of a partnership with City of Glasgow College.
The only other entry is filled with bizarre and seemingly randomly generated text.
It begins: "Nancy boy Charles down the pub get stuffed mate easy peasy brown bread car boot squiffy loo, blimey a**e over t*t it’s your round cup of char horse play chimney pot old. Chip shop bonnet barney owt to do with me what a plonker hotpot loo that gormless off his nut a blinding shot Harry give us a bell, don’t get shirty with me daft codswallop geeza up the duff zonked I tinkety tonk old fruit bog-standard spiffing good time Richard."
A search on Google Maps for the Scottish Institute of Hospitality Science returns an address in Mumbai which appears to be in the middle of a motorway.
The address listed on the organisation's website is more than 450km away from the one listed on Google Maps.
It is listed as 'Life Care Hospitals' but on street view appears to be a furniture mall.
The Scottish Institute of Hospitality Science has a phone number listed on its website but each time The Herald called a message said: "The number you are calling is currently switched off, please try later."
An email address is listed - though when clicked it redirects to a misspelling of 'admissions' and will thus bounce back - but the institution did not respond to The Herald's request for comment.
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In the section 'life at SIHS' there are a number of pictures, ostensibly of students, which are all stock images.
A source said: “There have apparently been three cohorts which have gone through in the hospitality and leisure area.
“But when we’ve looked on the college systems those particular units don’t seem to exist on the systems.
“The staff that are working in the hospitality area have no knowledge of the project and they say that those courses, the SQA-awarded ones at least, are old units that are no longer taught at the college and haven’t been for a number of years.
“The diploma in air cabin crew operations is a college award but we couldn’t find it on the college systems either.
“There are no students listed either, so because those units don’t appear on the college systems there are no students attached to those units – so essentially it looks as though it doesn’t exist, but the college website says the partnership is active and running.”
A City of Glasgow College Spokesperson said: “We have successful partnerships in Scotland and all over the world delivering life-enhancing skills and qualifications for tens of thousands of students each year.
"We signed a pre-Covid Memorandum of Understanding with SIHS to deliver courses in hospitality, culinary and cabin crew operations, but the global pandemic derailed their construction of the campus facility in India, so the project has halted.
"The regularity of posts on the Facebook page of another organisation and whether their website has been hacked is clearly not a matter for us.”
Update: Since the publication of this story the SIHS website appears to have been removed
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