Hagan predicts divisive

A vice-principal of Robert Gordon University has warned that the failure to punish his boss will have “serious consequences” for the institution – and “drive a wedge” between staff and management.

Professor Paul Hagan claimed that any other employee would have been “disciplined, possibly dismissed” if they had behaved in the same way as RGU principal Ferdinand von Prondzynski and vice-principal Gordon McConnell.

An internal investigation found last week that the two men had breached the university’s conflict of interest policy by failing to declare their business link during the process for hiring Professor McConnell last year.

But the board decided against punishing them because it was concluded that the failure to declare they were co-directors of the same company was a “genuine omission or oversight”.

Prof Hagan, who joined RGU as vice-principal for research in 2015 after serving as a director of the Scottish Funding Council, had been on the panel which interviewed Prof McConnell for the post of vice-principal for commercial and regional innovation last year.

But in his resignation letter to Prof von Prondzynski, seen by the Press and Journal, he said he now believed it to have been an “inappropriate appointments process”.

He said: “I am firmly of the belief that had this information about this personal conflict been made available at the appropriate time an alternative appointment process would have been instigated, one with more than a single, hand-picked candidate, selected by you.

“We could then have avoided the embarrassing accusations of nepotism.

“The irony is that Gordon may well have been appointed through such an alternative process, but that is not the point. In my view and in this case, the ends do not justify the means.”

Prof Hagan said he was “surprised” by the outcome of the investigation and

“We could then have avoided the accusations of nepotism”

Knockdrin Castle is on the estate of the von Prondzynski family in Ireland