Exclusive:Troubled Scottish university under pressure to end secrecy over pay-off for principal

Iain Gillespie quit as boss of Dundee University in December, just weeks after revealing job cuts were inevitable to help plug a deficit of up to £30 million.

He was followed out the door by Amanda Millar, the chair of the university’s ruling court, earlier this week.

Staff have also voted to strike over a failure to rule out compulsory redundancies, while a financial recovery plan is expected to be considered at a meeting of the court next week.

Now the university is facing further scrutiny after it insisted on keeping its financial arrangements with Mr Gillespie secret.

After being asked by The Scotsman under freedom of information (FOI) laws for details relating to any pay-off agreed with the former principal, all the institution would say was: “The university expects that they be paid their contractual entitlement.”

It also declined to say when the information would be made public.

The Scottish Code of Good Higher Education Governance states: “Where a settlement agreement has been put in place for the principal of an institution, the information that will in due course be contained in the institution’s financial statements should be published as soon as possible after the date of the settlement agreement.”

It comes after the university previously refused to release Mr Gillespie’s resignation letter, following another FOI request from The Scotsman, on the grounds that it would contain personal information relating to third parties, such as names and contact details.

Mary Senior, Scotland official at the UCU union, said: “We’re still trying to understand what has gone wrong at Dundee University and how senior managers got the university into its current dire financial difficulties, but it’s clear that failures of governance and a lack of transparency were significant contributors.

“The best thing the university could do at the moment is be absolutely open and transparent and that includes with any payments made to outgoing senior managers at the university, including the principal.”

A spokesperson for Scottish Funding Council (SFC), which oversees public money in colleges and universities, said: “Employment matters, including pay, are the responsibility of individual institutions.

“However, recognising institutions’ obligations to comply with the Scottish Code of Good Higher Education Governance, we would expect the University of Dundee to release information about any settlement agreement with the former principal as soon as possible after a final agreement has been reached.”

In 2020, the University of Aberdeen was ordered to repay £119,000 of its grant to the SFC following an investigation into a pay-off agreed with its former principal, Sir Ian Diamond.

It had emerged that Sir Ian only triggered his year-long notice period at the moment he was succeeded by George Boyne in the summer of 2018, despite announcing his plans to retire from Aberdeen University a year earlier.

Investigations by the SFC and the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR) concluded that the university needlessly “incurred the cost of two principals” over a financial year as a result of its arrangement with Sir Ian, who is now the UK’s National Statistician.