The Scottish Government should hold an opencast inquiry and not be “seduced” by coal owners, according to Fife Council leader Alex Rowley.
He said he would welcome an inquiry into how sites have been managed and the financial arrangements placed around them. He gave his commitment to ensuring Fife played a role.
Mr Rowley said: “I worry that those who want to just get on with more opencast mines without the proper lessons being learnt and the proper insurance being put in place are waving a few hundred jobs as the carrot while the local environments and communities will then have to pay the price for generations to come and the coal owners are well gone with their millions of pounds of profits.”
“The Scottish Government should therefore agree to an inquiry and not be seduced by the coal owners.
“We need to learn what has gone so badly wrong so we do not make the same mistakes again.”
Environmentalists have protested against a Court of Session ruling which cleared Scottish Coal and Aardvark TMC of legal duties to control pollution from opencast sites and restore the land.
Liquidators KPMG had asked judges to rescind the responsibility of the two firms to return sites to their former condition.
Mr Rowley said it was disappointing and worrying that former opencast sites could be “cherry picked” for what is valuable and what is abandoned.