It is nothing to do with oil or special deals. The Scottish Justice Minister was legally obliged to consider the application.

And from another website this may be of interest to you:

“The night Pan Am 103 crashed in Lockerbie, every emergency service for miles around turned out, police, firefighters, ambulance service. In the days after, these same services along with hundreds of volunteers searched every inch of the countryside, fields and forests to recover the remains of each passenger,

Every passenger recovered was treated with the utmost respect, they were not just dead bodies but someones loved one and treated as such, the volunteers involved in the recovery didn’t ask or expect any money for this, they did it out of compassion for the dead and for their relatives

The residents of Lockerbie opened their homes and their hearts to the relatives of the dead when they visited Lockerbie, again they didn’t ask for or expect money, their compassion told them to do it.

When the US State department told relatives of the dead that they would not get back the recovered clothes of their loved ones, the ladies of Lockerbie challenged the State dept. and took it upon themselves to wash, iron and wrap in tissue paper each and every item of clothing that had been recovered and gone through forensics. Each article of clothing was then returned to the relatives, these ladies from Lockerbie didn’t ask or expect any money for this, they did it out of compassion for the dead and for their relatives.

If God forbid another American airliner crashed in Scotland, I’d like to think that same compassion would lead us to do the same as we did at Lockerbie.”

As Bob Dylan used to say: ‘Don’t criticise what you don’t understand…’