The troubled National Trust for Scotland (NTS), emerging from a turbulent regime under Chair, Shonaig MacPherson who is standing down – but with her CEO, Kate Mavor, inexplicably remaining in post – is mired in more controversy just as a Strategic Review of its operations begins.

Against a background of protest from a section of its members, the NTS insisted on selling off its HQ of no more than 13 years standing. This is Wemyss House in Charlotte Square in Edinburgh, an impressive Georgian building in arguably te best address in Scotland with the First Minister at Bute House on the Square and the Moderator of the Church of Scotland also a resident.

It has now emerged that the NTS had already sold Wemyss House earlier this year to developers for £8.79 million. This represents a loss of £3.25 million, NTS having spent a total of £12 million on the building – bought for £5 million in 1996 and with renovation and interior reconstruction costing a further £7 million.

In Trust for Scotland (ITFS) is an internal lobby group of members formed earlier this year to fight the NTS’s planned closures and redesignations of 11 of is properties, including Argyll’s Arduaine Garden. Today ITFS reiterated its criticisms of what it sees as an unsatisfactory management style on the part of the Trust.

In an article published today by The Times, ITFS cites the ‘secretive’ sale of Wemyss House as ‘another example of a bankrupt management style’.

The Trust’s defence against ITFS concerns about the true state of its finances was that it was indubitably financially sound and simply needed simultaneoulsy to cut its running costs (hence the proposed turkey shoot of its properties) and to build up greater reserves.

Given the assumption that this was indeed the case, it is odd that NTS has gone ahead quietly with what has all the appearance of a fire sale.

No one who did not have to do so would contemplate selling so prestigious and valuable a property at the bottom of the market.

Talk of savings in operating costs, in its planned move to Hermiston Quay West, will be perfectly true, but if the Trust’s finances are indeed in good order, its management must be open to ITFS allegations of incompetence if it has sold Wemyss House unnecessarily at such a loss.

A range of figures with public responsibilities from Union leaders to MSP’s has today gone on the record to express a spectrum of criticisms and concerns on the current management of the NTS in respect of this matter.

George Reid, former – and distinguished – Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament will be presiding over a complex and difficult Strategic Review.

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• Packed 5 hour AGM for National Trust for Scotland (1)
• A score for In Trust for Scotland in dispute with NTS (1)
• At last some good news for National Trust for Scotland (0)

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