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The questions about what grounded FlyGlobespan last month are being asked more widely. And as I detailed in three takes on The Ledger last month, they keep coming back to E-Clear, the company that handled the online transactions for the Edinburgh-based airline.

Its chief executive, Elias Elia, denies responsibility for Globespan's demise. But he remains the focus of Globespan's administrators, who have lodged a legal action asking for E-Clear itself to have administrators called in.

This is a manoeuvre to get Mr Elia to show the £35 million they say he withheld from Globespan. You may recall Globespan's administrators said more than half of that money was for seats on flights that had already landed, and therefore no longer at significant risk of being reclaimed.

Prove it, responded Mr Elia. So he received a disk with the booking information this morning. And the administrators await any evidence to the contrary.

E-Clear has claimed that most of the £35m (a total figure that doesn't seem to be disputed) was due for flights not yet taken, and legitimately withheld because it was subject to credit card holders reclaiming the money for tickets purchased. If that were true, the average passenger would have paid more than £300, which seems quite a lot for a low fare airline.

Mr Elia's answer: lots of them were on package holidays. But are package holidays not covered by the ATOL industry insurance scheme?

Zoom grounded

Another legal action, asking courts to wind up E-Clear, was lodged in the hours before Globespan's directors had to call in the administrators three weeks ago. The directors no longer have any legal standing. But the administrators, PricewaterhouseCoopers, have not withdrawn that action.

Mr Elia's problems spread across the Atlantic. In Canada, Scots exile Hugh Boyle is pursuing E-Clear for £300,000. This is for money paid through E-Clear for holidays booked by Canadian snowbirds heading for the winter sun with Go Travel Direct. That company is now dormant, and hasn't had anyone on its holidays for more than six months. But there's still 500,000 loonies (Canadian dollars) due to be passed back.

Mr Boyle lodged a legal action pursuing his loonies, equivalent to £300,000. In response came a lawyer's letter, saying that E-Clear is entitled to withhold money as long as 12 months after flight tickets have been used.

What I'm now told by Hugh Boyle is that Mr Elia has since been back in touch, unhappy about the publicity all this is receiving and wanting to settle. Mr Boyle reckons there were roughly 20 phone calls and 10 texts to Ottawa on Tuesday alone.

The same Mr Boyle was on the board of Zoom, the airline chaired by his brother John, which went under in August 2008. Zoom also used E-Clear for online transactions. Hugh Boyle isn't saying the withholding of money was the problem then: it had more to do with the sky-high cost of fuel during that summer.

But he does recall Mr Elia being enthusiastic about saving Zoom by investing in it, holding out prospects of support which never materialised. Perhaps by coincidence, that's exactly what was happening when Globespan had to call in the administrators last month. Mr Elia was lead negotiator for a Jersey-based trust, Halcyon Investments, which was offering to put 15 million euros into Globespan. That didn't come to anything either.

Stranded travellers

Another development today is a travel trade report that Allbury Travel is now in administration. Trading under several brands, including Libra, its parent company was controlled by Mr Elia, and it used E-Clear for online transactions. It ceased trading on December 19.

Mr Elia has subsequently been quoted as saying this was a "strategic" move. A report that Allbury Travel was in administration turned out not to be true at the time. It simply revoked its ATOL insurance, and left the Civil Aviation Authority to bring home 100 stranded travellers and pay back a few thousand forward bookings. But now, we can look forward to hearing what Allbury's administrators have to say about the role of E-Clear and what is still owed.

Talking of the Civil Aviation Authority, it raises the question of who was and is overseeing the activities of E-Clear. The airline regulator says it had no direct role beyond running the ATOL industry insurance scheme, while licensing FlyGlobespan and other airlines.

So what about the Financial Services Authority? E-Clear is a company which, until its clients started going bust, was handling several hundreds of millions of pounds each year. It looks very much like a financial services company. Yet I'm reliably told there was absolutely no regulator of how it handled that money, beyond recourse by its clients to the courts.

Happily, that situation is changing, but only as of two months ago, when a European directive required national financial regulators to begin overseeing those who deal in "merchant acquiring" - that is, credit card transactions. Indeed, it won't be until April of next year before the FSA has to approve and licence all such companies. All it can do now is to oversee so-called "conduct of business", but not to second guess the contractual relationship between transactions processor and vendor.

Goodwin spokesman

Most such transactions are carried out by banks, with Barclays and our old friend the Royal Bank of Scotland as major players. To a very controversial extent, they already have the FSA on their case.

Banks typically hand over the money to vendors five or six days after the transaction, meanwhile making a bit of margin on that money with short-term deposits. But E-Clear has been hanging on for months, and probably earning a bit of income from investment of, or interest on, that money. Insiders at FlyGlobespan say it was facing an average delay of payment of at least 70 days.

The Economist magazine has also been looking into E-Clear's affairs, and this week raises questions about which banks are backing E-Clear's transactions processing. It seems this used to be Deutsche Bank.

But that link was broken in 2008. Mr Elia isn't saying which bank he works with now, even though E-Clear actually has a controlling stake in another smaller German bank, Nord Finanz.

There's good news for those of us trying to hear Mr Elia's point of view. He has slightly improved his communications with the outside world.

He's hired a spokesman - the same bloke, as it happens, who speaks (or doesn't) on behalf of Sir Fred Goodwin.

Update - 1730 Friday

There's more - confirmation today that the Serious Fraud Office is asking questions about E-Clear. It responds to complaints lodged with it, without saying who's done the lodging.

And it carries out some intelligence-gathering before deciding whether a formal investigation is required. That's why it's been asking what is going on at E-Clear.

Ridiculous, says E-Clear. This is not worthy of SFO investigation: it is merely a problem of contractual differences.