AN SNP councillor who failed to declare that he lived across the road from a proposed £350 million Inverclyde housing project while voting to curtail the development has been found to have breached the Code of Conduct for Councillors.
Councillor Innes Nelson backed a recommendation to impose a 270-home cap on the number of houses which could be built on the IBM site in Greenock at a planning board meeting in March 2, 2022, which the site owners said would make the project unviable.
Legal representatives of site owners James and Sandy Easdale immediately questioned the decision due to the councillor not declaring that he owned a property on the opposite side of the dual carriage way into the site, and lodged a complaint with the Ethical Standards Commissioner in Edinburgh.
The commissioner has now found that the ward six representative contravened three parts of the code by not revealing his property nearby and his previously expressed concerns about development on the site.
The Ethical Standards Commissioner will now forward their findings to The Standards Commission for Scotland.
