Recently in Commercial Property Category

Some positive news for businesses in Inverness and the surrounding area.

Highland Council has agreed to approve the construction of the ambitious Inverness Airport Business Park.

Infrastructure work for the first phase of this major development could get underway later this year with around 10 hectares being made available for office and other business use.

In the fullness of time the whole 250 hectares at the site will be developed with up to 350,000 square metres of business accommodation built including supporting facilities such as hotels, conferencing, shops, creches and other amenities.

What with holidays, snow, podcasts and magazine deadlines for Insider I didn't quite manage to round up 2009.

Rather than go through the big stories and events I want to do it a bit more personally and look back at the large profile interviews I did during the year.

Each chunk below has a link to the interview if you want to read a bit more.

The first one I did in 2009 was appropriately enough, given the current weather, in a snow covered Falkirk industrial estate with Jamie Rae of Redeem. He was extremely honest and open which for an interviewer is great.

Then I was off up to the Raploch to speak with Campbell Christie about the regeneration in Stirling, football and politics.

A slightly shorter journey saw me going downstairs from my office to spend an hour with Margaret Laidlaw from Tenon to discuss accountancy, entrepreneurs and the recession.

Even though the print edition of Business7 isn't back until January 8 it has still been a really busy few days.

I would hope a few of you have listened to our podcast or downloaded it from iTunes.

We also did our first ever live web coverage of an event and our Pre-Budget Report updates, with expert opinions from Tenon, Henderson Loggie, Scottish Chambers of Commerce, McGrigors and Lesley Campbell, can be accessed here.

Throw in a strategy and planning meeting for the paper, Insider magazine and our whole web operation and it would have been easy to miss some of the really positive Scottish business news which has been announced in the past few days.

News the government of Dubai was seeking a standstill on the debt repayments of its investment vehicle, Dubai World, is currently reverberating through the world's financial markets.

Dubai World has interests in all manner of industries globally and has a number of UK investments in property, leisure and ports, among others.

However it is being weighed down by its property arm Nakheel, which counts the iconic Palm Islands development in the Gulf among its assets.

Ripples from this reach all the way to Scotland as Leisurecorp - a division of Nakheel - bought Turnberry, host of the 2009 Open Golf Championship, for £55m last year.