AT least three members of staff from a Scottish college who took a share of a severance package worth £850,000 are still working in the public sector.

Details of the current jobs of former managers from Coatbridge College, in Lanarkshire, emerged as moves are made to investigate the case by the Scottish Parliament.

According to college accounts, the second highest payment went to former acting principal Margaret Rose Livingstone, who was paid £120,000.

After leaving the college she secured a job with schools quango Education Scotland as an inspector, where she has written reports on the future of student engagement in further education.

A number of individuals understood to have received smaller payouts include Derek Banks, the former college head of finance, who is now a senior financial executive at the Scottish Qualifications Authority.

Sarah Jane Linton, who was faculty director at Coatbridge, is now quality manager at Kelvin College, in Glasgow. Her account on social networking site Twitter was closed yesterday.

A spokeswoman for Glasgow Kelvin College said: "She was recruited on the basis of her skills and experience within the further education sector and started work with the college at the end of April 2014."

Lorraine Gunn, who was head of human resources at Coatbridge and also secretary to the board of management, has now secured a job as Employee Relations and Resourcing Manager for the National Museums of Scotland in Edinburgh.

Former principal John Doyle, who is now retired, received a severance payment of £304,000 when the institution merged to form New College Lanarkshire in 2014. His pay-off was £175,000 more than guidelines recommended. One other individual involved has since died.

None of the individuals responded to requests for comment by The Herald yesterday.

MSPs have launched an investigation after seven people from the college shared the payouts amid allegations official advice calling the payments into question was “deliberately withheld”.

The case, which came at a time when college budgets were being cut and staff laid off, was described by Auditor General Caroline Gardner as one of the most serious failures in governance she had ever encountered at a meeting of Holyrood's Public Audit Committee earlier this week.

The Scottish Funding Council (SFC) questioned the payments at the time, but it was powerless to stop them and concerns were also raised that their advice had been deliberately withheld from the college remuneration committee.

Because there was nothing illegal in the way the payments were made, the principal and officials cannot be prosecuted nor the money recovered.

Ms Gardner told the committee: “These are very serious failures of governance, amongst the most serious that I have seen in my time in this role.

“What appears to have happened is the chair of the board and the principal worked together to achieve a certain outcome, with members of the remuneration committee not receiving the information they needed to make their decision, and not receiving the concerns that had been raised by the SFC.

“It was a deliberate withholding of information, as far as I am able to draw a conclusion from the evidence that is there.”

Thirty-three staff left Coatbridge College as part of the merger, at a total cost of £1.7 million, of which the SFC contributed £1.3 million and the college contributed £397,945.

The accounts note that the SFC had concerns about the severance terms for the principal and senior management team and reinforced its guidance on several occasions. "However, the college's chair and principal did not provide the remuneration committee with advice provided by the SFC," the accounts add.