Scottish work that is accused of trying to hide the link of the candidate with a scandal company | Work

Labor is confronted with questions about transparency after she had not disclosed that a selection candidate worked for a company that had previously been involved in a counterfeiting scandal.

The party did not tell the voters in Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse that their candidate Davy Russell had worked as a consultant for a subsidiary of the Mears Group in the neighboring area of ​​North Lanarkshire.

The Scottish work is exposed to the selection of a defeat that suddenly died in March according to Christina McKelvie, the popular Scottish national party in the region.

Labor fears that there could be third place behind reform UK, which would send shock waves through the party. It would be a significant reversal of assets for the workers, since in October 2023 it won the adjacent Westminster seat of Rutherglen and Hamilton West through a landslide.

Last year it turned out that Mears Scotland LLP allegedly falsified at least 13,000 maintenance documents after a whistleblower reported the company to the Auditators of the North Lanarkshire Council.

This prompted the council members to postpone the signing of a new contract for 1.8 billion GBP with the company, a joint venture between the Mears and the Council, which provides all maintenance and repairs for each council building and all 36,700 council houses.

In his application, Russell announced that he worked as a part -time consultant for the Mears Group and as an unpaid trustee for Sense Scotland, a charity, as an unpaid trustee for Sense Scotland.

Scottish Labor officers informed the guardian that Russell, formerly senior official of the city council of Glasgow, had worked for the subsidiary two days a week from the beginning of 2025 until he was selected as a Laboro -through candidate in April.

This work for Mears was not announced in his biography on the campaign website, which was founded by Scottish workers or in another campaign material. Instead, his biography says that “he supports people with disabilities, heads a local hospice” and is also a deputy Lord Lieutenant from South Lanarkshire.

An SNP spokesman said: “This will surely pull up the eyebrows in Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse – Scottish work has to come clean.”

A source of work that criticized the omission that the selection of the candidates was very closely checked. “It is outrageous that you try to hide it. The party has to be uncomplicated with the public about the candidates she introduces,” they said.

Scottish Labor would not comment directly on why she had not mentioned Russell's work for Mears in his campaign, but said: “Before she was a candidate, Davy Russell used his know -how in the local government to support the work in the North Lanarkshire Council.

Mears, one of the largest housing and maintenance groups of Britain, has close connections to numerous councils in the region, including South Lanarkshire, where the selection is carried out, and searched for home office to accommodate asylum seekers in the region.

In April 2020, it was criticized that they brought more than 300 asylum seekers in Glasgow to inadequate hotel accommodation in Glasgow. Two months later, a Sudanese man stabbed six people in one of these hotels and was shot by the police.

Within the Scottish work, the unrest is about your chances in choosing. Party numbers that are involved in the advertising were dismayed by the strength of the support for reform and anger on Keir Starrer and Rachel Reeves' spending decisions, especially over the winter fertilization payments.

At the beginning of this month, reform pushed the work to third place in a council selection in Clydebank, which the SNP won.

Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labor leader, said reporters during a campaign visit to Larkhall on Wednesday that he believed that Labor had to listen to potential reform voters.

“It is really important to emphasize that people who are attempted to choose reforms, the vast majority, if not all of them, are not racist, they are not stupid, it is not that they do not understand politics. It is because they are scunnered [fed up] Because they believe that the government does not work for them. “

Russell confirmed on Wednesday that he would not appear in a candidate debate organized by StV because he reported that he was not a polished media artist.