Glenshellach set to go

The office building at Glenshellach Business Park, Oban, part of which is leased to the Passport Office, is being taken over by Argyll College UHI, which is to move in there from Dunstaffnage. Grants of £7.5 m from the European Regional Development Fund and HIE will be used to refurbish the building and Dunstaffnage Learning Centre, which will be taken over by the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS) to accommodate its growing number of courses run in conjunction with the UHI Millennium Institute.

The Dunstaffnage building will be extended to include a visitor centre and Little Learners Nursery will remain there too.

Director of Argyll College UHI Michael Breslin said that under other circumstances the college (right) would have expanded where it was. ‘However, we offered to relocate to help SAMS, our partner in UHI and we’re delighted to say that the building at Glenshellach will be our new home,’ he said.

Director of SAMS, (below)  Professor Laurence Mee said: ‘The new developments will make it easier for people in Oban to access courses at Argyll College UHI and bring more students to SAMS, enhancing local prosperity and education infrastructure.’

Argyll College UHI hopes to complete its move by Christmas and the extended SAMS teaching facility must be completed by the end of 2010. The college continues to lease space to the Passport Office in the Glenshellach building.

Dunfermline fab more tentative

Scotland's biggest inward investment white elephant - the giant building constructed for Hyundai at Dunfermline more than a decade ago - may soon be put to use after California-based Zoom Diversified accepted a £10m grant from the Scottish Government to make solar panels at the Fife site.

Zoom, through its Kingdom Solar Limited unit, has agreed to accept the money under Holyrood's Regional Selective Assistance programme and has pledged to create 372 jobs. Zoom is believed to have been holding talks with the Scottish Government on obtaining R&D funds since March.

However, Zoom, which has been negotiating to buy the former Hyundai plant from its current owners, Freescale, still has not sealed a deal for the factory. Freescale, which is also a US company, confirmed that it still owns the huge plant and would say only that it is still negotiating a possible sale with "a third party" and that no deal has been struck.

A government spokesman said that Zoom has not yet received the RSA grant.  "They won't get the money until we are sure the project is going ahead," he is quoted.

The spokesman said he could provide no information about Kingdom Solar's activities in Scotland but a search in Companies House records revealed that it has an office at 3 Ponton Street in Edinburgh, but no listed telephone number and appears to have no employees at the office. It has not yet filed any accounts despite being incorporated in July of last year.

Kingdom's directors are(left) Zia Malik  and (right)
Zoaib Rangwala. Malik is president of Zoom
Diversified and Rangwala is the company's CFO and VP of operations, based at San Jose, California.


And will PVSC prove viable for Dunfermline?