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THE Government are refusing to release letters from one of the country’s biggest SNP donors – because they say the £600 bill is too high.

It is the third different excuse for blocking the correspondence between Stagecoach tycoon Brian Souter and ministers.

Souter, who has given £1million to the SNP, was knighted last year.

Under freedom of information laws, Labour asked for details of the Scottish Government’s communications with Souter.

But they insist it would cost more than the £600 limit for retrieving information to provide the correspondence.

This conflicts with previous reasons given – that Buckingham Palace banned publishing details and that Labour had not clearly identified the information they were looking for.

Scottish Labour’s Paul Martin said: “The SNP Government are now not even being consistent with their excuses.

“At every stage throughout the Souter cash-for-honours controversy, Alex Salmond has tried to cover up the SNP Government’s involvement.

“The public rightly demand and deserve the highest level of openness and transparency from their elected members.

“The longer Alex desperately tries to keep these documents secret, the more people will think he has something to hide.”

The SNP refusal comes just weeks after information commissioner Kevin Dunion said the Scottish Government “failed to comply” with the law by blocking the request.

The Court of Session earlier ruled that, under freedom of information laws, there is a right of access to information, not copies of actual documents.

Now the Scottish Government have said it would cost more than the £600 limit to provide the information.

An official wrote: “This is because to locate and retrieve the information you have requested, we would need to conduct a search of all the records of the Scottish Government.

“We file our information according to the subject matter, not by reference to the names of individuals with whom we have corresponded.”

Souter was knighted last year for services to transport and the voluntary sector.

Questions were raised because he announced that he would donate £500,000 to the SNP shortly after the knighthood ­ nomination was made.

But a report by Lord Fraser last November found that allegations that ministers directed Souter’s nomination were “wrong” and “ill-founded”.