Charlie Gordon MSP in trouble over virtual office payments

Posted on January 25, 2009 at 11:10 am by Alan

MSP Charlie Gordon faces criticism after it was revealed that he has paid £26,000 to a consultant, who he claims has acted in a “virtual office” capacity, when the consultant is his own son.

Charlie Gordon’s son, Gavin, received the £26,000 of parliamentary money from his father, for work that he performed on his father’s website, for directing calls for his father (in what his father described as a virtual office assistant role) and for some consultancy.

Gavin Gordon has been in receipt of monies from parliament for the last three years, for a company that he runs (GMG Solutions) which is run from a home office. In 2006-07 Gavin received £9,747 and in 2005-06 he received £1,400.

However, there is no website for the company GMG Solutions, and the domain listed on the invoices hasn’t even been registered.

Charlie Gordon maintains that he hasn’t broken any parliamentary rules in outsourcing work to his own son.

Parliament can back up all the invoices, all the paperwork is in order. The work undertaken has not broken any parliamentary rules and the family relationship was registered with parliament. All the information that is required by parliament has been supplied by me.

He continued, stating that his son provided a valuable service for him.

I have got a small number of staff and my PA and I are always on the move. We decided to move our office practically into a virtual office, and GMG (solutions) runs it basically like a contact centre where you have distressed constituents on the phone for up to an hour. What Gavin does is take all the details so that we are aware of all the issues in real time. With the best will in the world, I can’t be in the office or on the phone all of the time.

Modern telephony can, as you know, divert calls to anywhere in the world.