Staff, meetings and correspondence concerning response to Judicial Review Petition: FOI release

Information requested

1. Please state the full membership of the group within the Scottish Government brought together to respond to the Judicial Review Petition of Mr Alex Salmond. Please itemise any and all advisers brought in to assist.
2. There were 17 pre-arranged meetings and conference calls between August 2018 and January 2019 with legal counsel. Please state the identities of all attendees at these meetings and all participants in the conference calls, including all officials, special advisers, consultants and Ministers at each of these meetings and calls.
3. Please state the date or dates of any other meetings of the group or any other conference calls and itemise the names of all attendees or participants in the calls or those invited to attend.
4. Please disclose and publish all emails, minutes and correspondence relating to these meetings, conference calls and this group.

Response

In relation to the first part of question 1, question 3 and question 4, the Scottish Government does not have the information that you have requested.

It may help if I explain that there was no specific ‘group’ or secretariat set up to respond to the Judicial Review petition. Input on various issues related to that petition was gathered from a wide range of individual civil servants from time to time, depending on the nature of particular issues to be addressed. There was not therefore a ‘group’ established to respond to the Judicial Review.

Consequently, we do not hold the information requested at questions 3 and 4. Those questions presuppose a defined group in respect of which dates of meetings can be determined (for question 3) which in turn are referred to for the information requested in Question 4.

This is a formal notice under section 17(1) of FOISA that the Scottish Government does not have the information you have requested.

In relation to the second part of question 1 (“Please itemise any and all advisers brought in to assist.”):
Roddy Dunlop QC
Christine O’Neill
Burness Paull, LLP

In relation to question 2, we have already disclosed some of the information within the request in question 11 of your request under FOISA dated 12 August 2019 to which I responded on 13 September 2019 and which is therefore considered accessible to you. Under section 25(1) of FOISA, we do not have to give you information which is already reasonably accessible to you.
The Scottish Government does not have the information you have requested. This is because there were no other participants, including consultants, at those meetings.

This is a formal notice under section 17(1) of FOISA that the Scottish Government does not have the information you have requested.

 

 

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