Water regulator chief’s £400 restaurant meal was covered by office credit card

The former boss of Scotland’s water industry regulator claimed a £400 high-end restaurant meal on an office credit card, with the expense being paid despite the lack of a receipt, MSPS have heard.

Further details of the lavish spending at the Water Industry Commissioner for Scotland (WICS) were discussed at a Holyrood committee yesterday.

MSPS were furious as they quizzed officials from WICS and the Scottish Government, saying the extravagant spending at the agency was “unbelievable”.

In December, WICS chief executive officer Alan Sutherland resigned hours after

Audit Scotland published a report disclosing “unacceptable” spending.

One of these was the provision of £100 gift vouchers for staff as a Christmas present, which exceeded the £75 limit for gifts.

Another was the funding of a training course at Harvard Business School in the US to the tune of £77,350, including flights, for its chief operating officer Michelle Ashford.

It also emerged yesterday Mr Sutherland was paid six months of his salary in lieu of working his notice period when he resigned at the end of December. While an exact figure for this was not provided, in 2021 the commission said the chief executive officer’s annual salary was more than £165,000. At Holyrood’s Public Audit Committee, MSP Graham Simpson raised the £402.41 meal at the Champany restaurant in Linlithgow, West Lothian, where Mr Sutherland dined with an official from the New Zealand government in October 2022. Mr Simpson went through the most expensive items on the menu of the “fine establishment”, saying even the most expensive dishes would amount to a bill of just over £200. David Satti, who has recently become the interim accountable officer at WICS, said no itemised receipt had been provided and the expense had been covered on an office credit card, adding: “We have no way of knowing the exact items that were purchased.”

Mr Simpson said: “It’s unbelievable nobody thought to question it.”

Donald Macrae, chair of the board at WICS, said the meal had been wrongly coded as “subsistence” but nevertheless had been “instrumental” in securing income of £1.2million from New Zealand.

The organisation has 26 staff and had an income of about £5.3m last year.

WICS is unusual in that 20 per cent of its income comes from international consulting work, Mr Macrae said, stating the public body was seeking to develop this source of revenue.

Mr Macrae said there had been a “change of culture and focus on value for money” since the Audit Scotland report. He accepted that the restaurant bill did not show value for money and new controls had been put in place.