The revolving door between the bureaucracy and environmentalists whirrs once again. A week or so ago, I noted the campaign by Friends of the Earth, and in particular their director Richard Dixon, against Dart Energy, a company that is trying to expand its coalbed methane operations in central Scotland. The campaign took a lurch towards the disreputable when Dixon gave his twitter followers to believe that the suspension of the company's shares on the Australian Stock Exchange was caused by financial difficulties rather than - as Dixon surely must have known - it being normal procedure for a company about to undergo a financing round.
The financing has now been successfully completed, underlining the misdirection by Friends of the Earth, but there has been an interesting new twist this week. As well as being the director of Friends of the Earth Scotland, Dixon turns out to be a board member of Sepa - the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency - the regulator to which Dart Energy must apply for its licences and to which it must genuflect every time it wants to do just about anything more dramatic than take a coffee break.
Being confronted by a regulator with senior staff who want to put you out of business and who are putting out a veritable campaign of disinformation against you in the media must be a bit unnerving for company management, so it's perhaps not too surprising that Dart's lawyers wrote to Dixon asking him to desist.
We find it deeply troubling that, as a Board Member of SEPA, you are making these comments on a public forum such as twitter. SEPA is responsible for granting, varying and revoking licences in respect of the coal bed methane production at Airth. Furthermore, they are one of the bodies who will be required to be consulted in respect of Dart Energy's application to the Scottish Government to consider the ongoing planning applications to Falkirk and Stirling Councils.
There is a clear conflict of interest which arises as displayed by your comments on your twitter feed and the fact that as a member of SEPA you may be required to consider future applications by Dart Energy or consult with the Scottish Government in respect of their ongoing application. Please confirm that you will
1) take no involvement with any consultation to do with our client's activities;
2) remove the above noted tweets from your twitter feed; and
3) refrain from posting any further material about our client's activities given the conflict in interest due to your position as a Board Member of SEPA.If you agree to the above terms, and sign the acknowledgment overleaf, we will take no further action. We look forward to your response within 48 hours or we will consider all legal remedies available to our clients.
The reply from Dixon was, perhaps not unexpectedly, that Dart should take a running jump and there has been much huffing and puffing on Twitter about attempts to gag Friends of the Earth. These protestations are somewhat unconvincing, however, because the only place the letter sent by Dart's lawyers mentions FoE is the address. The threat was to Dixon as an individual.
I'm not sure about the letter. The conflict between Dixon's position at SEPA and his role at FoE is clearly real, and disturbing for those of us who worry about good governance. His campaign of disinformation is well documented, and right up there with the worst of his colleagues in the green movement. The entanglement of the two issues makes a suitable response hard to gauge. But legal letters need to make a stand for free speech, otherwise they risk backfiring. This may not matter if Dart really can make a go at getting legal redress - I have no idea how easy it is to get these kinds of charges to stick - but if it proves to be an empty threat then they will lose twice over.
We await developments.