SIR, – I feel that I should clarify any misunderstanding that may have arisen as a result of the story reported in last week’s The Scottish Farmer with regard to the management of the Bluefaced Leicester Sheep Breeders’ Association.

In hindsight, a snatched telephone conversation with your news reporter, Gordon Davidson, when he called me to ask for a comment on the situation, was barely adequate to do the subject justice.

The problems that plague the association are manifold and complex but most of our problems stem from the confusion which surrounds the trusteeship structure of the association?

Our book of rules clearly states that the council of management is the body that manages our association. Therefore, because we are a registered charity, it is these people who are the trustees of the charity.

However, a smaller group of four within our organisation, over the years, have assumed the mantle of being ‘The Trustees’ despite the fact that our book of rules does not confer this responsibility on them.

This misconception began to have more serious implications when a member of our council of management began to provide a service to the association by way of managing our website, producing newsletters, etc. I may add that this individual provides a fantastic service and it is quite proper in every way for our organisation to employ him in this way.

It was highlighted from the floor at the breed’s 2009 agm, in Carlisle, that the payments which were being made to this individual were legally required to be disclosed in the accounts of the association. This suggestion was vigorously contested by, amongst others, ‘The Trustees’ – who maintained that they were ‘The Trustees’ of the association.

This was clearly wrong and left the association open to the accusation of not being transparent in making payments to members of its trustee body.

At this year’s agm, in May, 2010, payments that had been made to two of the trustees, who were part of this small group, had been disclosed in the accounts. This meant that these two members were now beyond reproach as far as their dealings with the organisation was concerned.

However, this left the third trustee in a position where the membership were left to guess how much he was being paid in return for his services as the payments made to him were hidden within the accounts.

It can only be concluded from this, since the process of disclosing payments does not bring any significant increased costs or burdens to the association, that the failure to disclose the payments to the third trustee was merely reluctance on the part of ‘The Trustees’ to concede that it is the entire council of management that make up the trustee body.

I will leave it to the reader to decide whether it is right that this small group should expose one of their fellow trustees and the reputation of the association to criticism for no other reason than to doggedly retain their misleading status of being ‘The Trustees’.

In conclusion, if ‘The Trustees’, instead of shooting the messenger every time they heard something that was not to their liking, had let the council of management get on and do its job, then things could have been very different.

There would have been no need to involve the regulator in order to finally convince ‘The Trustees’ that they were only part of the trustee body, which is the association’s council of management. Member’s money would not have been wasted on solicitors in an attempted to preserve the status of “The Trustees”.

And, the Scottish members who resigned because they were fed up with the unwarranted interference from ‘The Trustees’ may still be on the council of management. Finally, there would have been no reason for the association’s dirty linen to have been washed in public.

Alternatively, we could all have stood around with our heads in the sand for a wee while longer and waited for the next batch of council members to resign from the council of management.

Neale McQuistin

High Airyolland,

New Luce,

Newton Stewart