Alistair Bonnington has hit out at the Law Society's “suspicious” decision to externally account for £98,000 expenditure on the abortive move from Drumsheugh Gardens, rather than have the Society‘s own audit commission look at the figures.

Bonnington had lodged a motion before the forthcoming SGM for the audit committee to review the expenditure, but a Law Society council amendment to the motion proposes instead that an “independent review” be conducted by Henderson Loggie, the Society’s Auditors, at further cost to the Society.

“My initial curiosity over this matter has become, I'm afraid, something like suspicion,“ Bonnington says.

“It is extraordinary in my view that the Council of the Law Society's response to my Motion is to suggest that instead of going to the Audit Committee this matter should go instead to the Society's own auditors - and that under a much more restricted remit than I had proposed.

“Further the Council want the report from these auditors to go not to the membership as I had proposed, but back to the Council who will then decide what is to be disclosed to the membership. Why?”

Bonnington has expressed his concerns in an open letter, calling on all members of the profession to attend the SGM or vote by proxy. In the letter, he also expresses his concern that the audit committee had previously looked at the relocation project in the summer of 2008 and recommended to the Council that year that an independent report be commissioned. However he says the Council “have done precisely nothing about that recommendation.”

“Plainly they were going to do nothing had it not been for my Motion. Now they seem scared of the matter going back to what is its natural home - the Audit Committee,” he adds.

“It is also worth mentioning that while the Audit Committee would charge no fee for their work preparing a report, the Society's Auditors will do so. I would have thought the last thing any responsible lawyer would want to do, having wasted nearly one hundred thousand pounds on this project, is to increase the members' financial liability even further.

"Getting information from the Society to its members over this relocation project has been like drawing teeth. Nothing comes out unless pressure is put on the Society. My initial curiosity over this matter has become, I'm afraid, something like suspicion. These concerns can be allayed only by the matter going to the Society’s Audit Committee as my Motion proposes."

Bonnington's letter can be read in full here, and the agenda for the SGM can be viewed here.