Nicola Sturgeon has been urged to apologise for “deliberately misleading” business after a judge ruled that fracking has not been banned in Scotland, despite her claims to the contrary.

The First Minister and other senior SNP figures claimed last year that the controversial form of gas extraction had been banned.

But the petrochemical giant Ineos lost its legal bid to overturn the “effective ban” on the process when Lord Pentland said it had never been outlawed in the first place, and ministerial statements saying it had were “mistaken”.

The company that runs the huge Grangemouth refinery complex went to court with another firm, Reach CSG, in a bid to have the policy declared unlawful.

They argued ministers acted illegally last year when they converted a moratorium on fracking into an indefinite, effective ban.

However, the government’s QC argued during the hearing at the Court of Session that talk of a ban was just “gloss” and the “language of a press statement”, and ministers had merely expressed their preferred position on a policy that was still evolving.