Cash questions

IT seems there is no end to the revelations on the ferries fiasco at Ferguson’s shipyard in Port Glasgow.

Just a day after former owner Jim McColl claimed that the Scottish Government had effectively gone on to ‘waste’ £200m by snubbing his offer to break the deadlock in the dispute, more staggering figures have now emerged.

Management at the yard say they cannot account for where £128m of taxpayers’ cash for the ferries project was spent.

Even by the sorry standards of this disgraceful five-year saga, that is a truly startling, breathtaking admission.

It also won’t cut it, frankly, and cannot go unchallenged.

The chief executive says he and his team are fully focused on the effort needed to complete the vessels.

But it cannot be beyond them to get answers to the serious questions that have been posed by the auditor general.

This is public money we are talking about here — and a considerable amount of it — at a time when the public finances are in a perilous state.

If the current regime aren’t going to delve into the books and get those questions answered then it is time an external body was ordered in to do it.

Remember that we have already reported recently how the yard is wanting even more money in the new year, after management told MSPs that a fresh injection of working capital will be needed to avoid redundancies.

The public purse simply cannot continue to write blank cheques for an organisation that refuses to answer basic questions about the oceans of cash it has already soaked up.