The SNP has been accused of holding a “secret” meeting in which the Government was told the initial V&A tenders “significantly exceeded” the project budget, three months before the independence referendum.
The Dundee Labour group claims the SNP has misled the public after it emerged senior party members nationally were told details of the spiralling costs as early as June last year.
The council has confirmed that local officials told Dundee’s two SNP MSPs and Finance Secretary John Swinney at a meeting on June 25, which was also attended by administration leader Ken Guild and council officials.
The Labour group on Dundee City Council say the SNP previously claimed they first alerted the Scottish Government in April 2014 that the tenders were unlikely to come within budget but did not know the actual extent of the massive overspend until last December.
The group say a freedom of information request to the council now reveals that another, undisclosed, meeting took place on June 25, where the senior SNP members were told the scale of the problem.
Labour has now rounded on the SNP, accusing them of deliberately withholding the information until January this year, while stating the government was only told of the growing project costs in December.
The FOI answer revealed the gathering in June was told “the initial tenders had significantly exceeded the budget for the project”.
It continued: “A meeting subsequently took place between the Scottish Government ministers and Dundee City Council on 18 December 2014 in the Scottish Parliament to discuss potential solutions to enable the project to succeed.
“At that meeting the contract price of £80.11 million was discussed.”
Labour group leader Kevin Keenan called on Mr Guild to explain if the SNP’s reason for keeping the information from the public was “commercial confidentiality” or “party confidentiality”.
He said: “He needs to explain if council officers have been gagged from speaking publicly about these meetings.
“I have put financial questions about the V&A’s cost to the former chief executive, the director of finance and the council’s legal officer. They refused to give me any financial information.
“The lack of transparency and corporate governance of this project continues to be exposed.
“I still await a response to many questions that I have raised with the council’s new chief executive.”
Mr Guild said: “The FOISA reply makes it very clear that at the time of the June meeting ‘commercial negotiations were continuing with bidders, no preferred contractor had been appointed and a revised final cost had therefore not been determined’.
“In short, the discussions were very clearly commercially confidential.”