MANAGEMENT and build errors over Scotland's ferry fiasco vessels have cost the taxpayer around £90m extra, the nationalised shipyard’s chief executive has said.
David Tydeman has responded after MSPs asked him for help in tracing £128m of public money which was ploughed into Ferguson Marine.
It had previously emerged that inquiries with the company into the ferry building scandal by Scotland's Auditor General Stephen Boyle failed to uncover what happened to the money. He has said existing records relating to transactions were "not organised or categorised".
Public spending watchdogs Audit Scotland have also admitted that it was unable to trace how a Scottish Government loans to shipbuilding firm Ferguson Marine Engineering Limited (FMEL) was spent.
At the centre of the continuing row is the awarding of the contract to tycoon Jim McColl's FMEL and the soaring £340m costs and delays of over five years over the completion of the ferries which remain at the Inverclyde shipyard.
David Tydeman, chief executive of the now nationalised Ferguson Marine (Port Glasgow) previously previously said they have not sought to evaulate old files because they "do not add value to the planning or budgeting work still needed to complete the vessels".
Richard Leonard, convener of the Public Audit Committee, which is is investigating the ferry debacle, wrote to him asking for him to account for the £240m that has been spent on the two ferries.
Of this, £128.25m was paid to FMEL.
The Auditor General has said that a further £110.3m to £114.3m is required by the nationalised Ferguson Marine (Port Glasgow) to compete the vessels.
Mr Tydeman has now told MSPs that he does not have details of a £45m taxpayer-funded loan provided by the Scottish Government and said he was focussing on the the £83m paid by Caledonian Maritime Assets Ltd (CMAL) - the taxpayer-funded company which buys and leases publicly owned CalMac's ships on behalf of the Scottish government - to Ferguson Marine when it was under the leadership of tycoon Jim McColl.
He was also also focussing on the nationalised Ferguson Marine Port Glasgow budget of £122m set out in March, 2022 and a further budget of £72m which was being sought as costs have spiralled from £97m.
Both Glen Sannox and the unnamed Hull 802 were due online in the first half of 2018, with one initially to serve Arran and the other to serve the Skye triangle routes to North Uist and Harris, but are at least five years late.
Mr Tydeman in response has strongly criticised the errors made by Ferguson Marine before nationalisation.
The executive, who has run the shipyard since February this year, said there was a £50m in additional cost linked to the passage of time and the overheads at the yard, and £40m from inflation and design complexities.
But his biggest criticism came through the extra £90m in costs which he blamed on "management and build errors". It related to the "function of mistakes and other factors" like the recovery from administration through the pandemic, over the "whole period" since the contracts were placed in October, 2015.
He said the main issues were that pre-nationalisation Ferguson Marine started constructions of the hull and superstructures before the design was complete.
He said: "This always, in my experience, adds significant costs, and embeds design baps and future re-work."
He said the firm did "not follow conventional shipbuilding practices.
Building a "largely empty ship" could have doubled the sub-contractor and direct labour manhours.
There were issues with the termination, as allowed in the contract, of the overall electrical and power management contracts in late 2019, by the principal contractor prior to administration and then problems associated with "significant changes" to new electrical contracts and new suppliers required in 2020.
There said there were issues in making "significant changes" to the design contracts and key engineering partners in 2020, after nationalisation.
He also said there were challenges in rebuilding the engineering teams post administration and in nationalisation.
He told committee convenor Richard Leonard that the build programme was "still coping with legacy issues embedded by decisions made in 2015 onwards by Ferguson Marine as well as factors from the past few years" that has led to the overall increase in costs.
A separate analysis raised concerns about the delivery of the vessels following further issues with "design gaps" and the ability to run on green fuel.
He inferred further issues with delivery dates sayings: “Overall, we will use the departure of GS [Glen Sannox] to dry-dock in late February as a milestone to reassess confidence of meeting the target delivery dates. Meanwhile, apart from the LNG Skids, we are managing the continuing list of ‘unknown-unknowns’ that arise on GS and continue the planning for a more efficient outfitting and commissioning on 802, learning from GS.
“The February date will also be a good opportunity to re-assess 802 and the structural consolidation progress, design cleansing process and the progress with fit-out.”
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