Alex Salmond, former first minister of Scotland, has started another legal case against the Scottish government. The court case comes after Mr Salmond took the government to court in 2019 over harassment complaints made against him, which the government mishandled. In the past, Mr Salmond was awarded over half a million pounds in costs for the case, but he now seeks a sum of £3m as damages and loss of earnings. The former SNP leader had been cleared of charges related to sexual assault in a 2020 criminal trial.
Sources say that Mr Salmond had lodged a petition in Court of Session for “misfeasance” by civil servants. The statement from Mr Salmond is due to follow. This development comes after a special committee in Holyrood was set up for investigating the government’s poor handling of harassment complaints by two female civil servants against Mr Salmond. The panel of nine MSPs concluded that the Scottish government’s harassment investigation was seriously flawed, added that women had been neglected by the government (not Mr Salmond), and criticized the way the complaints were handled
Mr Salmond had told the MSPs in charge of the inquiry that he was being plotted against by people near his successor, Nicola Sturgeon. He had even claimed that Ms Sturgeon broke the Ministerial Code by misleading the parliament during the inquiry. A separate independent investigation had cleared Ms Sturgeon of breaching the ministerial code. The Scottish government was compelled to acknowledge that their investigation was illegal and paid £512,000 of the former first minister’s lawyers’ fees when he filed a judicial review case.
The committee’s report on Mr Salmond’s harassment investigation was announced in the midst of disruptions in Scotland’s SNP leadership. As a response to the Scottish independence discourse in this spring’s election campaign, Mr Salmond created the Alba Party just a couple of weeks before. He sought candidates to stand in the list sections of the regional part in an attempt to pick up pro-independence votes
Read the full article from The BBC here: Read More