The Permanent Secretary to the Scottish Government, Leslie Evans, who we consider responsible for the "institutional failure" in the handling of the complaints against Alex Salmond - which cost us taxpayers an estimated £500,000 in court costs, was previously Assistant Director of Recreation at Edinburgh District Council. We think she may have faked a Council report in order to starve a community group of funds. We believe this matter needs investigation and if it is proven she was culpable in this, she must stand down from the Government.

We think it is time for this matter to be explored to consider if Evans deserves to hold onto the confidence of the First Minister and the Scottish public. If there is evidence of wrong-doing, it needs to be brought to the public’s attention.

Therefore Cllr McVey, we want you to validate the Council petition that was declared invalid by your Chief Executive on the 24th Jan, after it had been submitted by the petitioner [also formerly the Treasurer of the Video Access Centre (VAC)] at  https://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/directory-record/1110041/investigate-1992-video-funding-strategy-council-report

We have read the petitioner's account of the VAC affair in “Fake News: How Public Lies Begin” at the Kids not Suits website at  www.kidsnotsuits.com/fake-news-how-public-lies-begin/ and in order to establish the veracity of this account, we believe the Council petition should be made available for Edinburgh residents and ratepayers to sign, if they so wish..

This Council petition that your Chief Executive declared invalid reads as follows:

“We Edinburgh citizens call upon Edinburgh Council to investigate the Video Funding Strategy report that we believe was falsified when passed by EDC’s Recreation Committee on 14th December 1992.

The Committee were told the assessment of the five video organisations the city supported at that time were the work of an independent arts consultant and that this assessment must inform the City’s funding policy for video. The recommendation favoured three of the organisations, to the likely detriment of the Video Access Centre, the only one that was 100% focussed on cheap public access and training. The art consultant has recently declared the report had been doctored, presumably by a senior Council officer, as an excuse to cut VAC’s funding.

Although VAC at the time managed to convince the Council not to cut funding, they continued to suffer through an ongoing lack of Recreation Dept recognition, leading to their eventual closure in 2006, by which time their Council grant was but half of what it had been 14 years earlier, though their turnover had quadrupled. We feel that it is time for the City to reflect upon why Edinburgh’s public access to film and video technology in 2019 is so much poorer than Glasgow’s and that knowing what took place in 1992 will help us all to understand that. We would like to see the culprit who allegedly falsified the report to be publicly identified and note that the Council presently has staff on the payroll who could identify this person.”

The Chief Exec declared it "Invalid in terms of the following points in our petitions criteria:
1.1 planning, licensing or other matters where objections and appeals against decisions are dealt with by another process.
2.1 names of people or details that could be used to identify a person
2.2 false or defamatory statements.
2.3 details that could damage a person's reputation or discriminate against them."

We think these objections to be themselves invalid. If a Council officer has faked a report, then they have damaged their own reputation by doing so and it is not in the Chief Executive's gift to engineer a cover-up.

We call upon the SNP and Labour Administration to either validate this Council petition or announce their own investigation into the "scandal of 1992".

Read supplementary information here