Accusations of cronyism relating to £150,000 of Scottish Government cash to help the T in the Park music festival are a cheap shot, the man in charge of the event has insisted.
Geoff Ellis, the chief executive of DF Concerts, said he did not believe he had been given priority access to Culture Secretary Fiona Hyslop after a former aide to Alex Salmond set up a meeting with her.
Jennifer Dempsie, a former special adviser to Mr Salmond, was working on a contract for DF Concerts as a project manager on the festival when she arranged a meeting for Mr Ellis with Ms Hyslop.
The Culture Secretary has already been questioned by MSPs on Holyrood’s Education and Culture Committee about the decision to award the cash to Scotland’s largest music festival – which this year moved from Balado to a new home in Strathallan, Perthshire.
Ms Hyslop told the committee organisers had warned they could move out of Scotland unless they could address the “severely reduced revenues” associated with relocating the event.
She insisted she had acted properly and the funding from the major events budget had been approved “following a detailed consideration of options” for operational costs associated with the transition to the festival’s new site.
Mr Ellis told the Sunday Heraldit would have been “crass” if he had threatened the minister with pulling the festival out of Scotland.
Speaking for the first time about the funding row, he said: “I told the minister what was open to us. We could have had a single-stage event on multiple nights, which we would have had to risk far less money on, but the returns would have been broadly similar. But we don’t want to do that.”
He insisted: “I’ve never threatened a Government minister and I wouldn’t make those threats. I think that would be crass. That wouldn’t happen.”
Mr Ellis also said he did not believe he had been granted “priority access” to the Culture Secretary because of Ms Dempsie’s links with the SNP.
He told the paper: “Did I get priority access to Fiona Hyslop? I don’t think so. Fiona knows who I am… The fact that she (Dempsie) set up the meeting, so what? Obviously if she hadn’t set up the meeting people couldn’t have made the accusation of cronyism – I get that – but it’s a bit of cheap shot.
“But was the meeting only had because Jennifer set it up? No. That’s completely ridiculous and an insult to the intelligence of Fiona Hyslop.”
Ms Hyslop has already told MSPs that T in the Park needed a seven-figure sum of cash to cover the “unanticipated costs” of moving the music festival.
She told the Education and Culture Committee: “The Scottish Government provides funding to profitable companies to safeguard jobs and support the economy in all of the sectors that are part of the key economic strategy of the Government.
“However, in relation to T in the Park, the costs of the transition, particularly the unanticipated costs, meant that, in the terms that they themselves have given information, that a seven-figure amount was required to provide for those costs, in particular moving from Balado to Strathallan.
“In light of the seven-figure costs and also in relation to the severely reduced revenues that they were anticipating, as provided to us in their budgeting in relation to that event, meant that the event itself, for this year certainly and in years going forward, would not be in a position that they would want to continue.
“Shareholders of the company were giving them an indication that it would be preferable for them to move, if there was not profitability for the event itself, from the multi-day, multi-stage festival which brings the economic benefit to rural Perthshire, to a single-day, single-stage event possibly in other cities like Glasgow as they have been doing recently. ‘Or to move the festival itself away from Scotland.
“That would have the economic situation where the £15.4 million of economic benefit coming to Scotland would no longer be in Scotland.”