What has been Scotland’s biggest public finances scandal in the era of devolution? I suppose the top of the head answer would be the “two Ferguson ferries” with well over half a billion in excess costs, when all the bills are totted up.

The crazed Deposit Return Scheme must be worth a few hundred million, even before you get to Biffa’s current £166 million compensation claim. I remember when this slow motion car-crash had hardly begun, Fergus Ewing telling me it would make the ferries look like small change.

Others can add to the list but my own nominee is rarely heard of because it is about money foregone for the public purse rather than squandered out of scarce resources, making it harder to pin down. I refer to the sale of ScotWind leases – or, more precisely, options to develop very large offshore windfarms. This has just become the subject of a report, Rethinking ScotWind by the think-tank Future Economy Scotland which attempts to quantify the gargantuan scale of potential losses and lessons to be learned. These are tasks to which no Holyrood committee, far less the Parliament, has yet addressed itself despite the mind-boggling sums involved.

The story started when Crown Estate Scotland – which, since being devolved, functions as a branch of the Scottish Government – invited bids capped at £10,000 per square kilometre of seabed for 20 offshore sites. If this had been proceeded with as intended, the maximum income to the Scottish........

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