Brian Wilson: We must hear from the man at the heart of the CalMac ferries fiasco

Arran’s stranded travellers might be amazed to know why this is impossible. For the chairman of Caledonian MacBrayne was, until recently, chairman of CMAL. In other words, the man who presided over the quango that failed to provide the ferries now heads the company to which the ferries were not provided – by patronage of SNP ministers.

In the undergrowth of this whole rotten scandal, the translation of Erik Østergaard from his CMAL role to the same position at the head of its front-line victim, CalMac, is one of the more pungent sub-plots. Of all potential candidates in Scotland, or even Denmark, he is one who should have been disqualified, because he was so deeply compromised. Why would he even apply, unless encouraged to do so?

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Scotland is not short of seafarers and engineers. It has never been clear why it was necessary to have the chief executive of a Danish trade organisation as a CMAL board member for 14 years, five of them as chairman. Throughout that period, while chaos evolved, he remained anonymous to the point that CalMac’s new chairman could stroll through any west coast port without fear of recognition.

In Edinburgh, however, his usefulness to the Scottish Government is indisputable. He is uniquely qualified to know where the bodies were buried when SNP Ministers rejected CMAL’s advice not to award the Ferguson contract. And as the Auditor General has discovered, that is gold dust information Ms Sturgeon and Co have no intention of sharing. Barring a public inquiry, Mr Østergaard’s silence is assured.

This is particularly convenient for both Ministers and civil servants at Transport Scotland. Frances Pacitti has, for four disastrous years, been director responsible for both CMAL and CalMac. Along with Ministers, she has an intense reputational interest in upholding the position that the collapse of Ferguson’s was the responsibility of the yard’s management rather than, as owner Jim McColl contends, of CMAL as client and the Scottish Government as political meddlers.

Given that context, one might have expected Ms Pacitti to stay well clear of the CalMac appointment, particularly once Mr Østergaard was involved. The opposite happened. Freedom of Information requests have established that in March last year, Ms Pacitti was appointed to chair the three-person panel to advise Ministers on the CalMac appointment.

In July, the FoI response revealed, Mr Østergaard emailed Ms Pacitti to confirm he had applied for the CalMac post. “Dear Frances”, he wrote, “For your information only. You will get it through official channels. Yours, Erik”. The Ethical Standards Commissioner, who oversees Scottish public appointments, has confirmed that this communication was not notified to him. Asked if he would “seek to establish whether there had been any other communications, verbal or otherwise, similarly unknown to him”, the Commissioner’s spokeswoman answered: “No”.

Now call me old-fashioned, but my assumption would be that no candidate for a public appointment should make contact extraneous to the process with the person chairing the appointments panel; that doing so should result in disqualification; that the civil servant would have a duty to report that (and any other) communication from a candidate; and that failure to do so would compromise the integrity of the whole process.

I put all that to the Ethical Standards Commissioner whose response was: “Ms Pacitti did submit a letter setting out the fact that she had a prior relationship with Mr Østergaard in her capacity as Director of the sponsor team for Caledonian Marine Assets Ltd…. The Commissioner was content the relationship was not sufficiently close to require Ms Pacitti to recuse herself”.

On that conclusion, we must agree to disagree. The outcome was that Mr Østegaard was duly appointed and a gross irony created. Let me repeat: The man who presided over the quango that failed to provide the ferries now heads the company to which the ferries were not provided. And the public will never know, if Ms Sturgeon is allowed to get away with it, why and by whom this catastrophic, politically-motivated contract was entered into.

The straight-faced claim by her that a “key point of decision-making has not been recorded in the way it should have been” is, literally, beyond belief. We already know that the announcement of the Ferguson contract was driven by a political timetable. It is inconceivable that there would not have been a flurry of meetings, involving the First Minister and those around her, to push through a sign-off on a matter of such significance.

There would have been an accounting officer, anxious to cover his or her back particularly in light of the CMAL advice. The idea that none of this was written down so that a clear line of accountability can be established simply cannot be true. If an open ended liability which looks set to cost Scotland £400 million and counting was pushed through without even that degree of probity, then Ms Sturgeon must answer for that – in a higher court than a Greenock arts centre. Jack McConnell, a former First Minister, is right to ask for police involvement.

Meanwhile, the people of Scotland’s island communities will be at the sharp end of this  business for years to come. The appointment of Erik Østergaard is a further insult to them by a political class concerned only with its own self-protection. He must be forced out of hiding and subjected to public cross-examination which he has been extremely adept at avoiding.

Those who are elected to represent island communities should, at every opportunity, pursue the anointed chairman of Caledonian MacBrayne for the answers others refuse to provide. Or has he too lost his memory along with the papers and emails from his previous role? How convenient that would be for the people who appointed him.

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