Edinburgh Trams - Crisis Deepens as TIE Board Members Walk Out

Submitted by actionman on Tue, 31 May '11 11.44pm

In the aftermath of the departure of the chief executive, Richard Jeffrey, the four non-executive directors of TIE have now left the board. This would seem to indicate that TIE itself is heading for disbandment.

It has achieved the unwelcome distinction of being seen as the most inefficient and ineffective organisation, which has made a complete mess of the Edinburgh tram project and cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds - all wasted. This has been simply frittered away while the staff have been paid inflated salaries for achieving nothing of consequence.   The sooner the whole organisation is completely disbanded the better.

Meanwhile, like the Titanic, the Council sails on towards the 30th June "iceberg meeting" when they plan only to look at the option of stopping the project or taking it to St Andrew Square.

For some reason Sue Bruce, the Council chief executive seems to have ruled out the stopping at Haymarket option - how very strange!   This is possibly the only option which would alow the line to be built (perhaps) as far as money will allow and for the promise of further expansion to be pursued once the financial crisis eases.

But possibly the Council, like Sepp Blatter, cannot see that there is a crisis!   We may even find that Sue Bruce is going to leave Edinburgh even worse off than she left Aberdeen if she persists in following the same foolish idea that hundreds of millions of pounds can be borrowed 'somewhere' - what happens when interest rates rise, as they surely will? Where is the economic logic in seeking to head even faster towards the iceberg of disaster when some basic common sense should warn both the chief executive and the Council that a change of course is essential - and right now!

(Appropriately possibly in view of the username) ...it looks like some sort of end game has begun on the Tram project.

With the CEO gone and the 4 'expertise' non-executives now bailing out the focus will fall on the four helpless 'Councillor' Non-execs remaining clinging to the wreckage of the foundering Board.

It may well be that Mr Emery and Sue Bruce have calculated that tie can be presented as the source of all the ills that have befallen the project and the elimination of the company said to have cleared the way forward to St Andrew Square with just another £200M more needed.

This is unfair on the hapless people charged with managing the unmanageable.

The ills of the project are a result of the plan itself ----and the various disasters now emerging merely symptoms of this underlying and fundemental malaise.

Far from being the lanced boil; it may well be that the present overdue demise of tie  will come to be seen as the continued unravelling of a thread that will soon lead from the arms-length to the main body of the Council of the moth eaten wooly jumper of a project that this has been from the start.

 

The main difference between the Titanic and tie is that, as far as I can remember, the Captain of the Titanic didn't bail out before the women and children. The Titanic also wasn't heavily under water before hitting the iceberg, or did Tie hit the metaphorical iceberg some time ago?