Who shot the sheriff?

ONE of the country’s top prosecutors has had her bid to become a sheriff shot down because of her alleged involvement and investment in a company illegally controlled by her husband, a businessman who was convicted of running it when he was banned from being a director.

Nicky Patrick, who applied to become a sheriff, is the Crown Office procurator fiscal for homicide and major crime. Her husband, Stephen Roberts, is awaiting sentence after his last appeal was rejected last month.

Roberts, a former bankrupt, was convicted last year of running two health and medical companies while he was banned from being a director. Patrick was the majority shareholder in one of them, Log Six Systems, or LSS. There is no suggestion that she knew about the management of the business at the time.

Roberts has a history of setting up companies which fail. In July 2010, he was banned from being a director for four years after failing to ensure Innova Business Solutions paid £292,882 in tax. An appeal judge described him as “evasive” and “devious” in cross-examination.

Previously he was a director of Synergi Global Solutions which went down owing £163,305 in tax and national insurance. He then set up Cornerstone Resources which was liquidated owing tax and NI of £121,678. In all of these companies Roberts paid himself £125,000 a year.

In 2013, while still banned from running a company, he accepted a £50,000 prize on behalf of LSS in a Dragons’ Den-style event funded by Scottish Enterprise and the Scottish Government. John Swinney, then finance secretary, presented the prize. Scottish Enterprise later withheld some of the money.

Roberts also qualified for legal aid, which funded a QC defending him because he claimed to be separated from Patrick and his income was assessed as a single person. He has received more than £45,000, according to the Scottish Legal Aid Board, although the bill for last month’s appeal has still not arrived.

It’s all pants

I came across My Shreddies, which I assumed was a fan club for breakfast cereal, on a toilet wall of a motorway service station. And, no, it wasn’t profanity either but an advert for what I can only describe as a range of flatulence-filtering underwear – although there appears to be no limits to the firm’s smell-reducing ambitions as they have branched into outerwear, adding pyjamas and jeans to the line.

Shreddies certainly put it all out there, in a filtered kind of way obviously. Their motto is “Fart with confidence”, instead of what we do now which is trepidatiously, on average 14 times a day.

All of the products have a flatulence-capturing carbon panel and you simply wash out the flatus and off you go again to fart in your pants to your heart’s content. OK, so your bum will look big in them but that’s a small price to pay surely, although at £24 a pair perhaps not? The next step for Shreddies is surely to add a noise reduction capability?

The company website features toned and glamorous young models in the underwear. And the stuff isn’t cheap, £83 for pyjamas, £120 for the flatulence jeans. The owner is one Paul John O’Leary, who also owns the Pink Pantaloon Company and, no, I didn’t ask him how many times a day he passes wind.

We’re fascinated, amused and often repelled by the process. You can buy fart cushions to place under visitors and for years Viz comic featured Johnny Fartpants, a boy clearly in need of doubling up on Shreddies. Then there was the French artist Le Pétomane, who could play La Marseillaise on an ocarina through a rubber tube in his anus and blow out a candle yards away. He was a baker and started out entertaining customers by mimicking musical instruments, before he took it to the stage. He wouldn’t have needed Shreddies, though, because his emissions were odourless.

The future smells

Toyota is launching a new car next year, the Mirai, which means future in Japanese. The company claims the car can run for a year on just one cow’s output of manure, extracting the hydrogen to power the fuel cell. According to Google, 20kg of manure will produce around one cubic metre of biogas, although I don’t know how much it takes to fill a Mirai tank. This is never going to work. They can’t even provide sufficient charging points for electric cars far less have cows replace petrol pumps on garage forecourts.

A Ruth-less quest

Ruth Davidson has surely set a record having gone from being a potential prime ministerial candidate to joining a lobbying firm within a couple of years.

Her second job, at £50k a year for 24 days’ work, is for Tulchan Communications, a company which could hardly be more establishment, from cheering for Whitbread and Santander, to Dyson to Jersey-based oil and gas giant Petrofac, Diageo and Unilever. Its managing partner is Andrew Feldman, a former chair of the Tory party.

There has been much pious comment about conflicts of interest over Ruth lining her pocket in this way while still an MSP.

But I don’t remember quite the same level of cant when Andrew Wilson, former MSP and prime lobbyist at Charlotte Street Partners, was writing the SNP’s economic manifesto, or suicide note, which promoted big business while promising years of continued austerity after independence.