Martin Williams

I specialise in investigations focussing particularly on business and finance and including how financial decision-making affects people - namely taxpayers and bill-payers. The three front page investigations submitted 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 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. The second piece reveals internal fears that the the same state-owned publicly-funded company, which has had hundreds of millions of pounds pumped into it faces closure due to lack of work. We used meeting accounts seen by us, and other documentary evidence provided to us to confirm the issues which included a so-called potential saving contract being worth just £2m. Those concerns were later confirmed in a 'going concern' flag by auditors and campaigns by unions and MSPs to have more public money pumped into the firm and save hundreds of jobs. The final piece is an investigation into how Scotland has lost out from the offshore wind revolution and was due to lose £60bn through the surrender of nearly two-thirds of the potential supply chain bonanza and the "underselling" of leasing rights. We again used analysis of Crown Estate declarations supported by experts. We also revealed that the nation stood to lose billions in profits every year through the flux of foreign investment into the schemes. It led to calls for an Scottish Government investigation by notables, including the respected think tank Common Weal.