People will rightly be appalled that their hard-earned taxes are being used to put Alex Salmond and his SNP ministers up in five-star luxury in some of the best hotels in the world.” This newspaper has also previously disclosed how the First Minister spent £250 on a pair of tartan trousers in China before waging an extraordinary campaign to keep secret his failure to refund the public purse. The new FOI showed his office racked up £58,640 of spending made using a “travel and subsistence card” between December 2008 and the end of last year. He continued to block much of the details about the spending for “security reasons” but the total included £21,379 at hotels around the world all but two of which were five star. They included the China World Hotel in Beijing, where the bill for his 2011 trip came to £2,174, and the Grand Hyatt in Hong Kong, which cost the public purse more than £1,000. The FOI response showed that all the other SNP ministers have spent £56,652 at 183 overseas hotels since they took power in 2007, 64 of which were five star and 100 four star. Shona Robison, the Sports Minister, spent £1,436 for a four-night stay at the five-star Atlantis Hotel in Dubai in 2009 when lobbying for a rugby sevens tournament to be held in Scotland. Mike Russell, the Education Minister, spent £1,800 at the five-star Taj Hotel in Delhi during a trade and training mission two years later. He also spent £1,500 on two stays in the Oberoi Grand in Calcutta. Richard Lochhead, the Scottish Environment Minister, ran up the highest bill of £13,409 but he had to regularly attend fisheries and agriculture meetings in Brussels.
Posted on: Mon, 21 Jul 2014 09:50:16 +0000
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