Sydney’s lord mayor has categorically rejected Angus Taylor’s version of how he came to rely on inaccurate figures of the council’s travel spending to attack her, saying “there were no alternative versions of the document” on the council’s website at any time.

The federal emissions reduction minister is continuing to insist his office did not forge a Sydney City council document, claiming in a statement on Friday afternoon there is “clear evidence” that different versions of the same report exist online.

Even though he has now admitted the figures he used were wrong and has offered an apology to Clover Moore, the saga of where the figures came from continues.

Taylor has pointed to the two versions online – one in Word and a PDF – to say there are discrepancies between the two versions. But he has still not explained how the numbers came to be altered nor has he produced the metadata for the document he relied on, which would help shed light on its origins.

“The figures used by the minister are not a small variation, they are grossly inaccurate,” a spokesperson for Moore said in a statement.

“There are no alternative versions of the report online.”

“At no time have the false figures appeared in the City of Sydney’s publicly available annual reports,” he said.

He also pointed out that the reports were submitted to the New South Wales local government minister and uploaded on the city’s website in November 2018, and metadata proves that at no time have these documents been changed or updated.

He said the material provided by the minister on Friday did not explain where the document with the incorrect figures originated.

With significant pressure building, Taylor issued a statement late on Friday afternoon saying he would be writing to Moore to offer his apologies for not “clarifying” numbers about travel at the council before writing to her in September.

The minister said there was “clear evidence” on the council’s own website “that there are different versions of the same report online right now”.

The material supplied by Taylor’s office points to minor formatting differences between the Word and PDF versions of the annual report currently on the council’s website. This is the evidence supplied by the office to argue that multiple versions of the same report have existed. The suggestion is that Taylor’s office accessed a draft of the annual report.

But Taylor has left it to the council to “prove which documents have existed and may still currently exist”. Taylor did not address the vast discrepancy between the figures for travel expenditure he accused the council of, and the actual figures displayed in the annual report on the council’s website.

Moore explained the slight variations by saying :“The City of Sydney does have two versions of our annual report online – it is uploaded as a PDF and a Word Document. The Word Document is available to assist with accessibility.

“We present the material in two forms to aid accessibility, but the content is the same. Difference in formatting occur as a consequence of file export and operating system used to open the documents,” she said.

But she said the content in the material is “identical in both documents”.

“The figures used by the minister are not a small variation, they are grossly inaccurate.”

The statement from Taylor’s office says the Department of Environment and Energy has confirmed that the minister’s office accessed the City of Sydney website on 9 September, but there is no evidence supplied in Friday’s statement that the report was downloaded from the council’s website.

The minister’s attempted defence of his position came after the shadow attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, formally asked the NSW police to investigate how his office came to use a doctored document to justify a political attack on the Sydney mayor’s climate change stance.

Dreyfus wrote to the NSW police commissioner, Mick Fuller, on Friday morning asking him to investigate the “highly concerning” revelations in the Guardian about the doctored document.

“According to that article, a report published in The Daily Telegraph on 30 September 2019 regarding travel expenditure by the City of Sydney Council was based on a forged version of the council’s annual report,” Dreyfus wrote.

“That forgery, which dramatically overstated the Council’s annual travel costs, was allegedly provided to the newspaper by the office of the Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction, Mr Angus Taylor.

“The false figures were also reportedly referred to in a letter sent by Mr Taylor to the lord mayor of Sydney, Ms Clover Moore.”

The Guardian revealed on Wednesday the false figures were used by Taylor’s office to unleash a political attack on the Sydney lord mayor last month.

Taylor claimed that Moore had increased carbon emissions by spending $15m on travel, a claim that was later backed up with a doctored council document provided to the Daily Telegraph, which the paper subsequently relied on to report the incorrect figure.

Taylor’s statement on Friday said his office, in preparing a reply to a letter from the City of Sydney lord mayor, accessed a report on the City of Sydney website on 9 September.

“The details in that report were the basis of my letter to the lord mayor,” Taylor’s statement said. “What is clear now, is that the numbers in that document were not correct.

“I reject absolutely the suggestion that I, or any members of my staff, altered the document in question; however, I will be writing to the lord mayor to offer my apologies for not clarifying those numbers with the City of Sydney before writing to her.”

Taylor said Labor had “dramatically overreached by claiming the documents were forged or altered” when there was “absolutely no basis for these assertions”.

The minister argued Labor had referred the case to police “as a political tool”, behaviour he characterised as “desperate and irresponsible”.