Meeting of the Parliament 29 March 2017
This debate is about a £10 billion deal with two Chinese companies—one that has connections to human rights abuses in Africa, and the other that promised billions but, so far, has only bought a pub in Buckinghamshire.
Without any checks, the deal was signed by our First Minister. The Scottish shambles was born and Keith Brown was the midwife. Today’s debate is to discover why our First Minister’s signature is so cheap and how the Government and its economy secretary Keith Brown were so easily duped by a couple of gents in shiny suits and a knighthood. We seek an apology and to censure the economy secretary for the handling of this shambles.
Members will recall that all this began last spring. A document was signed by Peter Zhang, Sir Richard Heygate and the First Minister. It was an agreement between the Scottish Government, SinoFortone and China Railway No 3 Engineering Group and, we were told, it was worth £10 billion. A photograph was taken but no one in the Scottish media was told. We discovered it all only through the Chinese media, which is unusually shy for the Scottish National Party Government, we might think.
The Government did not do the basic checks. We did, and they immediately flagged concerns about gross corruption in CR3; concerns about human rights followed soon after. These are the words of Amnesty International UK in a letter to the First Minister last year about the China Railway Group:
“After undertaking detailed due diligence, the Norwegian fund concluded that there is ‘an unacceptable risk that the company is involved in gross corruption.’”
The letter went on to say:
“other members of the China Railway Group ... have been implicated in serious human rights violations in the DRC, including the violent removal of artisanal miners from sites and other forced evictions.”
Those are two serious concerns about human rights. Those concerns had been in the public domain for years. If only the Scottish Government had bothered to check.
The SNP went into defence mode. For defence number 1, the economy secretary, Keith Brown, told the BBC that CR3 had already invested in Wales, so it must be okay—except that it had not. He was confused, because it was SinoFortone that had supposedly invested in Wales. However, as we will discover later, that was not true either. Defence number 2 was that no specific projects had been discussed, yet officials were instructed to prioritise funding building sites in Falkirk for the Chinese—so, that was not true either. Defence number 3 by the Scottish Government was that it was not an agreement, anyway. However, I have seen the document, the signature and the picture: it was an agreement. There was an agreement and there were specific projects, but there was no track record in Wales.
The Scottish shambles, as it is known in China, was growing by the day, but the response from the Scottish Government was to claim that the deal did not exist, then to boast about the deal that it said did not exist and then to accuse everyone else of jeopardising the deal that it said did not exist. It was a shambolic response to the Scottish shambles.