Martin Williams

I specialise in investigations including how financial decision-making affects people - namely taxpayers and bill-payers. The three front page storires are examples of exclusive front page agenda-setting stories in the public interest that hold power to account and were widely followed up by other publications.

One of the exclusives (which are cited in no particular order) related to the growing scandal of bonuses paid to executives of publicly funded state-owned companies at the centre of what is now generally known as Scotland's ferry fiasco - after we broke the story over failures in both the delivery of two lifeline vessels to serve Scotland's islands and the consequent breakdown of key lifeline services to the islands because the current ageing fleet cannot cope. Our use of the term 'ferry fiasco' and 'ageing fleet' is now widely used to describe the situation. The payment in this case to state-owned Ferguson Marine - the owner of the last remaining shipyard on the lower Clyde - which still has not produced the ferries have been made despite the Scottish Government's public sector pay rules maintaining a suspension of performance related bonuses since before the shipyard firm was nationalised in 2019. It also came despite the First Minister saying he did not expect there to be bonuses. The run of revelations over the public company bonuses have continued to date and the questions in Parliament which led to MSPs calling for the bonuses to be scrapped continued into last week when calls were also made for a review over the pay policy. We used well sourced briefings, as well as details of a confidential memo and other analysis to uncover the bonuses at Ferguson Marine, the nationalised shipyard which has failed to produce the ferries six years after they were supposed to be delivered. The costs of the ferries have soared to four times their original £97m price. My piece on investigation into a state power abuse in a failed fraud case against key figures at the Scottish football club Rangers. We revealed that the most senior law officer in Scotland admitted that the prosecution of a former Rangers finance chief was malicious. We got access to court papers that confirmed the scandal while confirming that the case had already costs taxpayers over £50m in payouts to others that were accused. We had revealed that judges at the High Court in London had ruled that police and prosecutors "abused state power" during the club fraud investigation which resulted in a series of arrests.

I did an investigation into how how cheap foreign labour was replacing Scots on wind farms and has led to a planned mutiny at one offshore project. It was the result of UK government concessions allowing the employment of cheaper foreign nationals on offshore wind projects. It caused pressure on the UK Government closure of the loophole - and the issue was raised in Parliament. As of earlier this year that loophole was closed.