Meeting of the Parliament 29 March 2017
I would like to try, if I can, to do two things—first, to ensure that Parliament has clear facts on the status of the memorandum of understanding and what has happened since, and secondly to set out lessons that we have learned from the experience and how we are taking those forward.
Willie Rennie mentioned two different things. First, he said that it was a deal and then he said that it was an agreement. It is quite clearly a memorandum of understanding, which was based on the fact that we wanted to have further discussions. I would like to make it clear to Parliament that this Government takes full responsibility for the handling of the MOU and for the issues that have arisen from it. I regret that some of those issues have arisen, and I will seek to address that as I speak.
Given the concerns that have been raised, I want to assure Parliament that no financial commitment was made at any point on behalf of the Scottish Government and that none has been made since the signing of the MOU. Similarly, there have been no legal or contractual agreements with either of the companies that are named in the MOU. Finally, we have had no engagement with either company since September 2016. If earlier discussions had at any point resulted in specific investment proposals, of course we would have undertaken full due diligence at that point, as we do with all investment proposals.
Willie Rennie mentioned Amnesty International and the report. That has been fully investigated, and while it made no reference to and did not relate to China Railway No 3 Engineering Group but to its parent company, we agree that that information should have been known to us prior to our agreeing to sign the MOU. The lessons that we will learn from this situation are important ones.
In particular, I reinforce our commitment to human rights, which our amendment makes clear. I think and would hope that this is central to the points that Willie Rennie has raised consistently over the past year. While we—obviously—already consider human rights issues in all our engagements with other countries, we will ensure that we do the same in our engagements with overseas businesses.