SCOTTISH Labour's Jenny Marra is under pressure to explain why she claimed the beleaguered former chief executive of NHS Tayside was getting a £300k pay off.
The true figure was a still-whopping, but significantly smaller, £90k.
Lesley McLay announced she was leaving the health board last week.
She’d been on sick leave from the £125k-a-year job since April, the day after being told she could not continue at the crisis-hit board.
Her position was described as untenable after it emerged that NHS Tayside – which has been bailed out with £45 million of Holyrood loans in recent years and will require a further £12.7m for 2017-18 – had used charity donations from the public to pay for a slew of new projects, including IT costs.
Marra claimed on Monday that McLay received a package worth more than £300,000.
The health board said that was "categorically untrue" and that the payments were "legal and contractual entitlements and no additional payments have or will be made by NHS Tayside".
BBC Scotland revealed on Wednesday that the actual pay off is £90,000 in full, including pension contributions.
SNP MSP Sandra White, who sits on Holyrood’s Health Committee, said Marra needed to retract the “baseless claims” and explain where she got the figure of £300k from.
“Jenna Marra must now retract these utterly bogus and baseless claims after the health board has proven them to be utterly false.
“We are used to this sort of thing from Labour, as they continually seek to mislead when it comes to the NHS in Scotland.
“But Marra’s claims aren’t just wrong and misleading, they are wildly off the mark – and it appears to be a deliberate attempt to undermine our health service.
“People have legal entitlements and the NHS simply cannot refuse to make those payments, but as Tayside has said throughout there has been no “payoff” or golden goodbye as Ms Marra claimed.
“Jenny Mara must now apologise and publicly retract her baseless claims – as well as setting out on what basis she made them.” A Scottish Labour spokesperson said: "Even if this figure is correct, the public will rightly be outraged that such a large amount of money is being handed over to someone who played a leading role in the gross mismanagement of NHS Tayside."
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