[0762]

It's all ultimately down to interpretation ritchie and people can believe what they wanna believe. I'm more interested in seeing the FM move on from this difficult period where there are no real winners. Also as Jim said before, Ecky is not guilty but lots n lots of folk regard him as being guilty and the cause of all this shit but he couldn't be "brought to book" because of a lack of evidence, something I actually said in a thread at the very beginning of this fiasco well before this scandal finally hit a court of law - evidence from years gone by very difficult to come by. So proof of guilt almost impossible to verify. The disappointment was always why the case was ever brought to a law court in the first place. My wife regards him as guilty of unsatisfactory sexual behaviour in the workplace and I'd say most female members of my family and friends generally share the same view that the female complainants were badly let down. Is there a strong gender disparity re that perception of Ecky being a sleazy sex offender??? I don't know! My only response to that is it appeared to be possibly a minor offences case if it was ever pursued in a law court but I was never gonna argue with that female viewpoint - life's too short ha ha ha! I will also add that in many similar instances, a company or business that experienced such a scandal would try to discreetly remove the individual and possibly "pay him off" to avoid the huge negative publicity! I've witnessed this type of action twice and I can vividly recall one instance when a paedophile, a married man with kids, was discovered by IT checkers from a well known Edinburgh company and guess what - the company opted to sack him immediately, pay him off with a generous sum of money but the HR instruction was not to report him to the Police (what a great moral stance eh!! NOT!!!) in order to avoid any damaging publicity suffered by the company. In Ecky's case it was slightly different in the fact that he was accused of historical sexual misbehaviour but I'll bet the Scot govt would've similarly loved to have kept this whole scandal discreetly "under wraps" and dealt with internally for obvious reasons incl avoidance of all the shit that we are discussing - it's a f##### minefield of unsubstantiated speculative shit!!! They couldn't do it because they are committed to due process and transparency and exposed to public and media scrutiny unlike previously mentioned unnamed businesses who were not so closely scrutinised and handled it differently.