Alex Salmond is earning more being a newspaper columnist than as a parliamentarian, it has emerged.
The former First Minister has revealed he receives more than £2000 a week for articles in the Press and Journal and Courier newspapers published by DC Thomson.
The payments are declared by the Gordon MP in a newly updated register of interests at Westminster.
All the money is paid to Mr Salmond’s personal publishing company, Chronicles of Deer Ltd, which also receives income from his referendum diary, The Dream Shall Never Die.
In the new register, Mr Salmond states that “until further notice”, Chronicles of Deer will receive £13,500 per quarter in respect of each DC Thomson title for “articles and interviews shared by the newspapers and online platforms”, making “£27,000 in total” each quarter, the equivalent of £108,000 a year.
He says the articles take “6 hrs per week”, making his pay rate around £350 an hour.
So far this year, Mr Salmond has received £101,800 for sales and royalties in respect of The Dream Shall Never Die, and £54,000 from his DC Thomson articles, a total of £155,800.
As an MP, Mr Salmond is entitled to a standard salary of £74,000 this year, while as the MSP for Aberdeenshire East he is paid a further £19,700, a total of £93,700.
However he pays his MSP’s salary, along with his First Minister’s pension of £2,598 a month, to the Mary Salmond Trust, a charity working in North East Scotland.
Mr Salmond’s first revealed the scale of his book earnings in June, when he disclosed he had been paid an initial £91,800.
His new register reveals he has since been paid a further £10,000 for “additional sales of a book already published” involving “no additional hours” of work.
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