Publicly funded bodies seem to create “Public Appointments” when they need to avoid employment law. I.e. they need to avoid creating an employer / employee relationship.

Can Acton do this on his own. Probably. If it is delegated by his board of Goveners or ratified by them after the event.

The key issue, is does this get them out of their FOI requirements and I do not think it does. A Public appointee is not exempt from FOI. Rather they are subject to FOI because fundamentally they are being paid from the public purse. There are clear guidelines as to what is exempt and mainly that is to do with personal information.

/ikh

IT WAS A HUGE SCANDAL …and Muir Russell was at the heart of it.

Muir Russell … “He was widely believed to be primarily responsible for the massive overspend on the new Scottish Parliament Building and was criticised by Lord Fraser of Carmyllie’s enquiry for failing to keep the politicians informed that the expenditure was far in excess of the budget.”

And it is a hideous building.

Muir Russell then took office as Principal of the University of Glasgow in 2003. Notice he’s a civil servant. No former involvement in education. Who’s just been involved in a massive overspend which was a massive scandal in Scotland. He then gets involved in a lecturers strike. He goes from mess to mess but still ends up becoming the Chairman of the Judicial Appointments Board for Scotland.

I wish I had sent my submission by post … because that way I could have gone to the small claims court to get the cost of my postage back on the basis that there was false misrepresentation.

Muir Russell is the civil servant who was widely credited with being the one who was responsible for the debacle which was building the Scottish parliament. What happened? He got a rather cushy job at Glasgow University. When that ended he got another cushy job in charge of judicial appointments in Scotland.

You notice the pattern? He has a rather charmed life going from one cushy appointment to another.

He clearly knows which side his bread is buttered.

I also looked into the Further and Higher Education Act of 1992. While I could not find a specific statute that mentioned inquiries, at least one statute seem to give University administrators broad discretionary powers.

What is needed in the EAU controversy is an inquiry into the inquiry and the overall performance of the university’s administration, which is what the National Audit Office performed in your link above. Steve and others have raised several important and incisive questions about the propriety of the Muir Russell inquiry and related matters. These questions will not go away any time soon. The Climategate emails reveal a high level of unethical and unprofessional conduct at EAU. Something needs to be done about it.

It may be that there are better ways to get to the truth of this matter than through FOIA requests. I don’t know how realistic it is to seek an inquiry by the National Audit Office, but the situations at the two universities in question have their similarities.

The Freeh Report on the Sandusky scandal at Penn State was prepared at the request of the PSU Board of Trustees after the University had conducted a fraudulent invesigation that served to coverup Sandusky’s long history of perverted acts. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that there are people at EAU that are prepared to call for the kind of comprehensive investigation Freeh provided.

If so, by default, the script hides comments older than a specific age. There is a setting in the script which needs to be changed in order to fix that (or the script can be disabled but then you lose the HTML help when making comments).