Good day dear readers,
We’ve taken the bank holiday and hope as many of you as possible are enjoying it. In place of the briefing, we’re going behind the curtain of a busy few weeks at Bell HQ.
At 7.30am on Thursday, Beth and I were on an early morning field trip to Edinburgh’s Court of Session, smart in ironed pleats and clutching a letter from Moya that said we were real journalists and had to be let into proceedings, please. In other words, we were ready to rock.
The purpose of our visit was a hearing relating to the story we published on Saturday, about the increasingly troubled finances of one of Scotland’s biggest family restaurant chains. In that piece, we revealed that, in the last 12 months, the multi-millionaire owner of Tony Macaroni has been hit with eight different attempts to liquidate his central company from creditors who want debts paid. That’s on top of unpaid wages to staff and suppliers left out of pocket.
The creditors petitioning Viva Italia, the central company of Sep Marini’s group of businesses, are big players. We’re talking real estate firms who control property portfolios worth millions and billions. The Thursday hearing that Beth and I were off to involved such a company: Fidelity UK Real Estate Fund. They’re the UK arm of a trillion-pound asset management firm. Their heavyweight nature is demonstrated by the fact banking behemoth JP Morgan handles all their UK business; it was JP Morgan who had filed a (third) petition to get Viva Italia wound up.
This was the first opportunity we’d had to see a court decision on Viva’s financial affairs play out in person and we were hoping to talk to an associate or two who might actually answer questions about how much cash Fidelity were seeking from Marini’s company.
The Court of Session is in Scotland’s Supreme Court building and is as grand as you imagine: stained glass, oil paintings. The day’s schedule was posted physically on the wall, on A4 sheets, the court’s receptionist told us upon arrival. Double check there for details. We found them quickly: JP Morgan vs Viva Italia, due to start at 9am, court 12, easy peasy — we had 10 minutes to spare.
But 9am came and went. No wigged folk walked into court 12. The doors remained locked. 9.30am, still nothing. Surely we hadn’t missed anything. And I knew how dysfunctional and slow courts could be — Robbie wrote about Glasgow’s last court reporters just recently. At 11am though, even I gave in and went back to the receptionist. “Case heard at 9am on WebX” she said. Translation: it had been done online. Unfortunately, no one had informed whoever was printing the court rolls that day. Archaic tradition had failed to meet modernisation.
This shift from print to digital is ongoing in the press too. It used to be that online news was seen as the crappy little brother to print news. But as print costs mounted, digital took over. Quality didn’t always follow though, but that’s part of The Bell’s mission. To show that you can have both. Obviously, we’d love to have a physical edition (watch this space), but for now, we’re online and direct to your inbox, with journalism that’s intent on quality over quantity.
This week, we actually saw the direct impact of our work. After Alexander Ralston’s recent story about promoters and the Glasgow music scene, we got quite an… aggrieved response from Geoff Ellis, CEO of Scotland’s biggest music promoters, DF Concerts (as well as a follow up email from the DF Concerts comms team, asking us to take the piece down). The company features heavily in our article.
Following the article and Ellis’ comments, dozens of musicians reached out to us, sharing their experiences with DF Concerts. Now, an open letter is doing the rounds, calling on DF and King Tut’s to raise their minimum fee for support acts from £30 to £100. We have to say (for legal reasons): DF Concerts are by no means the only promoters to have such policies. But they are giants in the Scottish music industry, and any changes led by them would have a significant impact on gigging and touring — which is how musicians make money in an age of streaming.
This is why we do what we do. Sure, sometimes people don’t like it (here’s looking at you, Geoff), but good local journalism should stand up to power, take you inside worlds you didn’t know were on your doorstep, and work hard to highlight Glasgow’s strengths while also exposing the reasons for its struggles.
If you want to get on board with that sort of sustainable local journalism, join The Bell today.
