The Scottish Parliament Business Exchange is promoted as an educational exchange allowing members of the Scottish parliament to learn more about all kinds of business. All corporate participants are required to sign a letter affirming they will not use the scheme for lobbying. In practice the exchange is dominated by TNCs who pay up to £7,500 to join and three quarters of those taking part in it s first round of activities were full time lobbyists. It is the Scottish 'chapter' of the International Association of Business and Parliament, a company based in London.

In January 2007 it was announced that Devin Scobie had been appointed as the interim executive director of the Scottish Parliament Business Exchange. At that point he was described as Devin Scobie of Caledonia Consulting

Caledonia Consulting

Caledonia Consulting is a public affairs and communications firm in Edinburgh which is run by Devin Scobie. Scobie used to work for the public affairs company GPC International...

. Scobie is a former lobbyist with GPC International and has represented SPBE members such as Pfizer

Pfizer

Pfizer, Inc. is an American multinational pharmaceutical corporation. The company is based in New York City, New York with its research headquarters in Groton, Connecticut, United States...

as clients.

Purpose

Members sign up to, and programmes are planned and delivered, under certain key principles

• Non-lobbying and non-partisan
• Mutual trust - access to learning with respect for highly sensitive information (commercial/political)
• Transparent and open
• Responsive to the interests of MSPs

Policies safeguarding these principles include:

• letter of undertaking from participants and hosts respectively, relating to placement programmes
• acknowledging, where appropriate, specific programme topics subject to commercial confidentiality
• publication by The Exchange of programme costs
• guidelines to MSPs from Clerk to Standards Committee on registration of interests
• surveys of MSPs' interests and circulating of programme ideas for MSPs' responses