§ Mr. BurginWith your permission, Mr. Speaker, I rise to make a statement to the House by way of personal explanation. On Wednesday last, on the Motion for the Adjournment, the hon. Member for Shoreditch (Mr. Thurtle) raised a matter relating to certain Ministry of Supply contracts. The Government reply was made by me, as the Minister concerned; and in the course of my statement I used these words:
The right hon. and learned Member brought this matter to me early in December or at some such time. It was the first I had heard of it at all. I had never heard of the contractor by name, and I did not know any of the parties and should not have known which officers were in the War Office or who were under my control."—[Official Report, 31st January, 1940; col. 1218, Vol. 356.]I made that statement in complete good faith and believing it not only to be true, but to be the whole truth. It is the fact that I had never heard of the contractor. Indeed, a number of the contracts in question had been placed before the Ministry of Supply was formed. It is the fact that I had not met or heard of, by name, any of the officers concerned. To the best of my belief, I had not heard of the financier, Mr. Scott, and, of course, I had had no personal contact whatever with him in connection with these contracts. Since this matter has been raised in the House, photographs of Mr. Scott have appeared in the Press. These photographs 42 seemed to me to be familiar, and accordingly I at once instituted inquiries. I have thus discovered that the financier in question is one and the same person as a Mr. Scott, of the same initials, who, somewhere in the year 1928 and on various occasions between that date and a date in 1933, or possibly 1934, sought professional advice from the firm of solicitors of which I am a partner, though, of course, not now an active partner. I have ascertained from the firm that there were no transactions between them and Mr. Scott subsequent to that date. When I was making my statement to the House on Wednesday last, I had nothing before me and nothing in mind to connect the identity of the one with the other. Inasmuch, however, as my investigations show that that statement was in this one respect inaccurate, I have felt it right to take this, the earliest, opportunity open to me to make this further statement to the House.