The news that Health Secretary Michael Matheson has run up a bill of almost £11,00 on his parliamentary iPad has caused some consternation among politicians and commentators alike.
Today, one of our readers details what such usage might have entailed, and calls for openness on the affair.
Peter Wright of West Kilbride writes:
"I am with EE on my mobile phone contract and am advised that there is no standard data roaming charge for Morocco. Instead one must 'buy data add-on when you land'. That applies for contract, out of contract and pay-as-you-go. Michael Matheson must have had some kind of cost warning on obtaining that add-on.
"There is a suggestion that the cost per megabyte is £7. That would give Mr Matheson 1.57 Gigabytes for his £11,000 bill and as a WhatsApp message uses an average 30 kilobytes of data, that would give him 52,000 messages, a staggering four Covid inquiries full.
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"It is also interesting that the monthly bill for Mr Matheson exceeds the total phone bill for all MSPs for last year, which was £9,500. Something does not add up and I think Mr Matheson needs to give us some of the "openness and honesty" that the SNP promises but like so many of its promises, fails to deliver.”
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