Hairshirt Hester

So the RBS chief - Stephen Hester - will have to get by on his £1.2 million salary having finally bowed to the inevitable yesterday - by foregoing his planned £963,000 bonus payment.

In the past few days just about everybody who was anybody have queued up to give Stephen Hester a good kicking - trying to outdo each other with their moral outrage.

Yet the fact is that this kind of thing is going on all the time - without everyone kicking up a great fuss.

Just the other week an independent board - similar to the one that runs RBS on behalf of the great British public - handed out a 'golden goodbye' worth over £500,000 to the boss of regeneration agency - GERA -in Glasgow.

See post dated 17 January 2012 - 'Death Wish 2012'.

At least £208,000 of that 'golden goodbye' payment was complete discretionary - and much of the total came from funds that were earmarked to build a new school in Dalmarnock - one of the most deprived areas of Glasgow.

All of the money involved was public money - and the decision  to be so generous with these funds was effectively taken by three Labour councillors - who formed a majority on the independent board.

Now why would that not cause just as much - or even more - controversy than the Stephen Hester affair?

Because the two decisions are very similar.

The scale of the money involved is even greater - given the relative size of GERA compared to RBS - and while the two independent boards were, strictly speaking, entitled to do what they did - the arrogance involved is quite breathtaking.

I would have some time for people trying to turn the whole issue into a political football - if they were at least consistent in their concerns about the use of public money - and their condemnation of other people's behaviour.

Because as I see it there's little to choose between GERA and RBS - though only RBS has  caught the imagination of the national press and media.

Death Wish 2012 (January 17th 2012)

A regular reader has been in touch regarding the post on the extraordinary generosity of Glasgow City Council - 'Death Wish 2012' - dated yesterday.

A number of interesting points and questions arise which I thought I'd share with other readers - as follows:

1 How is it possible for a person to receive both voluntary and compulsory redundancy - at the same time?

2 How is it possible for money that was earmarked for use under one budget heading (the redevelopment of a school in Dalmarnock) to be spent on such a completely different purpose - i.e. part of a 'golden goodbye' package?

3 What was the original source of the funds and did the source of the funds place any conditions on their use?

4 Was Glasgow City Council consulted about the use of these funds and if so, how did this take place?

5 Given all the competing demands for resources in these tough economic times how did the Board of GERA (and Glasgow City Council if involved) justify - on 'best value grounds' its decision to boost the CEO's pension pot with a discretionary award of an extra £208,000?

Now I suspect that many of these points will need to be raised with Glasgow City Council and other public bodies - because a weakness of the current FOI legislation is that it does not apply to all publicly funded bodies.

Just like other arm's length bodies Glasgow City Council has set up - Cordia for example - these agencies are normally constituted as private companies - which means they operate outside the scope of the current FOI regime.

Notwithstanding the fact they are almost wholly funded - with public money.

The weakness of the current FOI legislation was a point made very strongly by the outgoing Scottish Information Commissioner - Kevin Dunion - in evidence he gave recently to the Scottish Parliament.

So I hope some intrepid journalists at the Sunday Herald and elsewhere keep pursuing these points - after all the public deserve an answer.