A senior Aberdeen councillor will be grilled today by watchdogs after he accidentally leaked confidential legal advice about the controversial Marischal Square project.
Finance convener Willie Young referred himself to the Standards Commission after he mistakenly sent a private e-mail to Fraser Garrow, an opponent of the £107million scheme.
Mr Young had intended to send the information to his former council colleague, Fraser Forsyth.
Now Mr Young is accused of breaching paragraph 3.14 of the Councillors’ Code of Conduct on confidentiality requirements.
It reads: “Council proceedings and printed material are generally open to the public.
“This should be the basis on which you normally work, but there may be times when you will be required to treat discussions, documents or other information relating to the council in a confidential manner, in which case you must observe such requirements for confidentiality.”
Last night, Mr Garrow claimed Mr Young’s error was symptomatic of the council administration’s “blase attitude” towards the opposition to the Broad Street development.
He said: “It’s obviously quite a telling error. There’s a lot of questions that need to be asked and hopefully that’s what will happen at the hearing.
“There’s been a blase attitude to the whole thing, and it contradicts the administration’s position when they have refused to disclose information to us because it’s commercially sensitive – surely there should have been due diligence shown by Mr Young.”
The Bridge of Don member has previously faced the commission after being accused of lying about a claim that suspending the Marischal Square development would cost the city £100million in fines.
He and six other prominent councillors were also called on to explain the distribution of pro-Union letters with council tax bills during the run up to last year’s independence referendum.
But Mr Young was cleared of any wrongdoing on both counts.
Today he will be represented by Roddy Dunlop QC – who successfully defended Alistair Carmichael in his controversial leaked memo court case – at the hearing at the Town House.
Mr Young added: “At the end of the day, if I have breached the code there’s huge mitigation in and around it – it’s human error, that’s life.”