the allegations of theft and re-instated to her job with BA. In 2010 she took voluntary redundancy from that job. The trial Preliminary hearings At a preliminary hearing at the High Court in Edinburgh on 13 July 2009, the indictment against Tommy and Gail Sheridan was made public. Both were charged with perjury in relation to several issues at the civil trial, and Tommy Sheridan was also charged with subornation of perjury by attempting to persuade Colin Fox to commit perjury at this trial. Both accused took pleas in bar of trial on the basis of prejudicial pre-trial publicity, and sought to raise devolution minutes. At a preliminary hearing at the High Court in Edinburgh between 28 and 30 July 2010, the trial judge Lord Bracadale, heard legal arguments on these matters. At the close of the hearing, the preliminary pleas were repelled and the devolution minutes refused. Due to the high-profile nature of the case, Lord Bracadale took the somewhat unusual step of issuing a note, setting forth his reasons for repelling the preliminary pleas and detailing his directions given to the jury with respect to media publicity. Representation The prosecution was led by Alex Prentice QC, his junior was David Nicolson. Initially, Sheridan hired Donald Findlay QC to defend him, but he later dropped him in favour of Margaret Scott QC, who represented Abdelbaset al-Megrahi in an appeal against his conviction for the Lockerbie bombing. Junior counsel for Sheridan was Shelagh McCall. Gail was represented by Paul McBride QC and Billy Lavelle. Her solicitor was John Paul Mowbray. On 11 October it was announced that Sheridan had dismissed Margaret Scott, and would conduct his own defence. He retained his solicitor Aamer Anwar, who the judge appointed as amicus curiae. The full trial started on 4 October 2010 at the Glasgow High Court before Lord Bracadale, with a jury of 13 women and 2 men, mostly younger women with one ethnic minority juror. On 15 December the judge excused one of the women jurors from serving further; the trial continued with 14 jurors. On 25 November and again on 2 and 20 December the prosecution removed a number of charges from the indictment. Prosecution case An important issue was the crucial SSP executive meeting of 9 November 2004, where Sheridan resigned as convenor. 16 witnesses who were present claimed that he did admit to visiting Cupids sex club in