THE former solicitor at the heart of the Michelle Thomson affair used to be a police officer.
Christopher Hales, 58, who was struck off for professional misconduct last year for his part in 13 property deals linked to Ms Thomson, served in the early 1980s.
When he married nurse Gillian Grigor in Dingwall in July 1984, Berwickshire-born Mr Hales gave his occupation as “police constable”.
Michelle Thomson row: SNP faces fresh questions over cabinet ministers endorsing business record
Revealed: the property portfolios of SNP MPs
Sixteen of the SNP's 55 MPs have financial interests in property
He subsequently retrained and was enrolled as a solicitor in November 1987.
He was suspended in September 2011 after a routine check on his Edinburgh-based firm Grigor Hales and later accepted a finding of professional misconduct.
It emerged yesterday that, after the Scottish Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal named and struck off Mr Hales in mid-2014, a newspaper alerted Police Scotland to the matter at the time.
The tribunal report said Mr Hales “must have been aware that there was a possibility that he was facilitating mortgage fraud, whether or not this actually occurred”.
It added it “must have been glaringly obvious that something was amiss” with some of the transactions involved.
However the police did not investigate until prompted by the Crown Office in July this year.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereLast Updated:
Report this comment Cancel