It is necessary to conduct some council business in private to avoid “scaring off” potential investors, the leader of Dundee City Council has claimed.
The SNP-led local authority has come under fire for excluding the public from two funding decisions at a committee meeting on Monday night.
It emerged this week that councillors had agreed to a £5 million, 10-year funding package for the V&A to help with its running costs.
The council also invested more than £200,000 in a stand-in flight between Dundee Airport and Stansted, starting in March, when the current service to London City ends.
Councils can legally exclude the public when discussing certain items they believe to be commercially confidential.
Ken Guild said the revealing of Monday’s funding decisions to the public could have a harmful impact on the projects.
The Ferry councillor said: “There are times when we are looking for investment, especially inward investment as was the case in both of these where people, particularly organisations and companies, can be scared off if their proposals are being debated in public.”
Labour councillors were earlier this week critical of the decision on the V&A being taken in private.
Their leader, Strathmartine councillor Kevin Keenan, had called at Monday’s meeting for the item to be discussed in public, but Mr Guild refused because there were “commercial considerations to be taken”.
Representatives of the voluntary sector and charities in Dundee have called for “transparency” in the council’s decision making.
According to legislation, a council can exclude the public from a meeting when considering a business item if it’s “likely, in view of the nature of the business to be transacted or the nature of the proceedings, that if members of the public were present during consideration of that item of business there would be disclosure to them of exempt information”.
The council usually terms two types of information as “exempt”. Firstly, the financial or business affairs of another person, body or business, and secondly, terms which are proposed during negotiations over a property, or in the supply of goods or services.