Absent-minded campus fatcat's UNFORGETTABLE £47,000 junkets

DO YOU REMEMBER THESE, PROFESSOR?

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A FATCAT uni boss who told MSPs he didn’t know his own £421,667 pay spent £47,000 on luxury foreign junkets in just two years, we can reveal.

University of Edinburgh vice-chancellor and principal Sir Peter Mathieson racked up £42,456 on business class flights to destinations including South Africa, South Korea, the US and Hong Kong between March 2022 and May last year.

Our investigation uncovered £3059 spent on accommodation, and £1336 on transport in Milan, London, Texas, Brussels, Warsaw and Hong Kong from September 2023 to last July.

It comes as his lecturers are set to walk out in a dispute over a refusal to rule out compulsory redundancies as part of plans to save £140million.

The principal, who took the role in 2018 appeared at a Holyrood committee last week and claimed he didn’t know how much he earned.

Scottish Conservative education and skills spokesman Miles Briggs said: “When Sir Peter plans to cut many hundreds, and possibly more than a thousand, jobs at the University of Edinburgh, people will be surprised that there is still the budget for trips of this sort.

“International travel to promote the university may be reasonable, but it's difficult to see why it should cost tens of thousands of pounds while swingeing cuts are being made elsewhere and so many jobs could be under threat”