THE FORMER chief executive of failed firm Pagan Osborne has resigned from the Scottish Government's review of legal services regulation six months after his old firm was forced into administration.
The review, which is being led by NHS 24 chairman Esther Roberton, will report later this year and is expected to make recommendations on how regulations could be improved, particularly in relation to how complaints are handled.
Alistair Morris, who had led Pagan Osborne since 2005, was last year appointed to the 11-strong review panel as one of three representatives of the solicitors profession.
Former Pinsent Masons partner and past Law Society of Scotland president Christine McLintock and Harper Macleod chairman Lorne Crerar were also appointed.
Mr Morris said he had chosen to resign from the review for personal reasons, adding that his position on the panel had not been directly linked to his role at Pagan Osborne.
“I don’t want to go into the reasons why I have resigned because they are all personal to me,” Mr Morris said.
“It was a position where I was nominated by the Law Society but approved by the Scottish Government.”
A Government spokeswoman said that as the findings of the review are due to be reported in September "there are no plans to seek a replacement [for Mr Morris] at this stage".
Mr Morris remains a member of the Judicial Appointments Board of Scotland - the body that recommends candidates for roles in the judiciary – with his term due to run until February next year.
The decision came after Mr Morris, who was president of the Law Society of Scotland between 2014 and 2015, returned to practice at Kirkcaldy high street firm Andrew K Price, a legal and estate agency practice that until 1992 had been part of Pagan Osborne.
Having joined the firm shortly after Pagan Osborne was bought out of pre-packaged administration by Dundee firm Thorntons, Mr Morris is now one of four qualified solicitors at Andrew K Price.
He has joined the firm as a legal consultant and is focusing on commercial conveyancing work as well as what he termed “a bit of private client”.
“I’m enjoying looking after and serving my clients,” he added.
Mr Morris has a long association with Andrew K Price’s named partner, Andrew Price, who joined Pagan Osborne on qualification in 1985. Mr Morris had joined the firm in 1982.
Having become a partner at Pagan Osborne in 1987, Mr Price bought out the firm’s Kirkcaldy office five years later and has run it as his own practice since.
When Pagan Osborne was bought out of administration Mr Morris was the only member of its 123-strong workforce not to move across to Thorntons, although over 50 people were subsequently made redundant due to the duplication of roles.
Pagan Osborne went into administration last September after being unable to pay off a number of sub-prime loans taken out to help with cashflow in the wake of the downturn in the property market.
Tom MacLennan and Iain Fraser of FRP Advisory, who also oversaw the winding up of firms including McClure Naismith and Tods Murray, were appointed joint administrators of Pagan Osborne at the beginning of September.
In a note to creditors issued soon after their appointment Mr MacLennan and Mr Fraser said the firm had suffered after moving into the Edinburgh market in 2009.
“The business was unable to achieve the anticipated turnover in the Edinburgh office and struggled to cover the costs associated with this office,” they said.
In 2013 the firm received a short-term loan of £1.3 million from an unnamed individual, whom it sought to repay by selling off its residential letting business.
“The business consistently experienced cashflow problems caused by the obligation to repay the loan received in 2013 and the general inability of the business to meet budgets,” the administrators’ note said.
“As a result of these cashflow problems and in order to clear liabilities with HMRC and others the company took out a number of short-term loans from sub-prime lenders with what are now clear were exorbitant interest rates.
"These short-term loans served only to exacerbate the cashflow problems of the company.”
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