MSP slams Crown Office handling of the Rosepark case

THE CROWN Office was under fire from a Lanarkshire MSP this week over their handling of the prosecution of the Rosepark care home owners.

Hamilton North and Bellshill MSP Michael McMahon welcomed last week’s announcement of a Fatal Accident Inquiry into the blaze in which 14 elderly residents lost their lives.

However, he expressed doubt this week over assurances which he said had been given to him by Solicitor General Frank Mulholland that the criminal prosecution of the Rose-park owners had been part of a ‘strategy’ from the outset.

A third attempt to prosecute Thomas Balmer (61), his wife Anne (60) and their son Alan (34) was thrown out at the High Court in Glasgow last Tuesday.

Judge Lord Matthews had described as “fatal” to the prosecution the decision to indict the Balmers, of Royal Gardens, Bothwell, as the surviving partners of the now-dissolved Rosepark Care Home.

Mr McMahon said this week that it was now difficult not to see the Crown Office’s prosecution of the case as flawed and a waste of taxpayers’ money.

He said: “I have always worked on the basis that the Crown never saw this coming. Someone somewhere hadn’t done the necessary work to see that the paperwork was in order. I have never been disabused of this idea.

“I was given the idea that the Crown Office went into this thinking they had a case to bring and it fell down because something hadn’t been done properly.

“Last week the First Minister took umbrage when I said in Parliament that the prosecution pursued had been a mistake.”

“The Solicitor General later reassured me that there had been no mistake and the Crown Office had pursued the prosecution as a strategy from the outset.

“As far as I’m concerned the families expected to see a legal prosecution. I was told they were pursuing a legal prosecution and the legal prosecution failed. That does not seem to me to be a strategy.

“What they are trying to get me to believe is that they pursued a legal action which they knew was doomed from the outset.

“I don’t know if that is a better situation than somebody making a mistake.”

Mr McMahon added that it appeared to him that a huge amount of public money had been spent to pursue a case which had little chance of success.

He commented: “If they knew a loophole existed, it raises doubts in my mind about the strategy they had been pursuing all along.

“During all this time they could have held a Fatal Accident Inquiry. They have been telling families that they’ve been pursuing a legal action, yet one which they knew was doomed.

“I have to ask if the prosecution wasn’t a mistake, then why didn’t they go for an FAI during their prosecution strategy?”