The Scotsman reports

DAVID FERGUSON


THE changing of the guard in Scottish rugby was completed yesterday when the last surviving member of the SRU's old governing body, finance director Graham Ireland, was moved out of his post - he remains as company secretary - and a business turnaround specialist moved in.

Gordon McKie, the SRU's new chief executive, has brought in his former business partner Eamon Hegarty to overhaul the financial operation at Murrayfield as the new head of finance and IT.


The 48-year-old, the SRU announced yesterday, will start on Monday and "strengthen overall financial control, purchasing and IT requirements" while Ireland focuses solely on the role of company secretary, which he took over in June on the retirement of long-time secretary Bill Hogg.

Hegarty will not have a position on the executive board, although that will be reviewed next year. McKie said: "My initial review of the finance and IT departments confirms that there is a lot to do and we need to strengthen various business controls. Eamon has been interviewed by our remuneration and nomination committees and has been appointed head of finance and IT. He is known to me and I have a very high regard for his financial management skills."

The change is not wholly unexpected and is likely to be welcomed within Murrayfield and by the club fraternity, who have all suffered swingeing and often unexpected cuts as a result of ongoing losses in recent years which have taken the overall debt over £23million.

With Hegarty and McKie known in the business world as "turnaround specialists", it would seem the SRU is set for a radical inspection.

Despite both working for John Menzies, of which, ironically, the chief executive was the SRU's sacked chairman David Mackay, the duo came together under David Murray's wing to resurrect his MIMTEC business. Once profitable, it was sold off and Hegarty and McKie moved on, in 1999, to revitalise Frazier International, an IT asset management company based in Dumfries. Two years later they sold it to a major French waste and recycling company.

In 2002, they took an 80 per cent controlling interest in the Glasgow engineering business Semple Cochrane, which had collapsed amid fraud investigations, and rebuilt the business as Semple. But, though they radically cut losses of £30m to make the company break-even, a failure to secure new business forced its closure in May.

The duo have reputations for overhauling poor financial structures and McKie has already admitted, as he did with previous jobs, that he was stunned by the lack of business sense apparent in his new organisation.

For Scottish rugby, Hegarty's appointment caps the third significant change of the SRU's ruling executive in as many years, Ireland being the last remaining member of the board which was set up in 2000 to take Scottish rugby forward as a professional sport. Despite his best efforts at balancing cuts with investment, the debt remains a massive millstone around Scottish rugby's neck, hampering performances on and off the field.

Under McKie, the SRU is again conducting a review of all departments and expenditure, with most employees having had to re-apply for their job. Interviews have been ongoing on an almost daily basis at Murrayfield with some job descriptions being altered and as many as 30 staff facing redundancy in the coming weeks. Many questioned how the financial director could retain his position when budgets have been stuck to and still the debt has risen, and McKie has clearly acted on the feedback he has been receiving.

In fact, Ireland was halfway out of the finance director's door in January when he had agreed to move to a new role involved with property, and a new finance chief was hired in the shape of Mike McGill. However, David Mackay was then forced to resign by the SRU's general committee and the leadership coup kicked into overdrive. As revealed in The Scotsman, this forced McGill, a highly-rated financial director, to rethink the move and he duly returned to his previous job at Macdonald Hotels.

Ireland survived, but it would appear that the new regime, led by chief executive Gordon McKie, has reached the same conclusion as their predecessors: that the union's financial operations were in need of an overhaul.

This article was posted on 6-Sep-2005, 11:24 by Hugh Barrow.