In a stunning twist to the Millwall CPO debacle, newly released documents show that Lewisham council and its offshore-registered developer Renewal admitted making a series of false claims on “funding pledges” which it described as “jumping the gun” while securing a £20m grant from the mayor of London to implement the land-grab scheme.

The news comes on the same day the mayor of Lewisham, Sir Steve Bullock, quit his position as a director of the sporting foundation at the heart of the scheme amid rising public pressure. Plans to seize Millwall’s land around The Den as part of the New Bermondsey regeneration were put on hold last month after information first published in the Guardian raised a series of unanswered questions about the funding of the scheme. As suggested in the Guardian last week Bullock’s role as head of both the council and the beleaguered charity at the heart of the Millwall land-grab scheme had become untenable.

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The latest revelations are perhaps the most serious so far and involve the housing zone status secured for the development from the London mayor Boris Johnson in 2015. The award of £20m in loan funding provided the project with access to a huge injection of public money and a major rubber stamp of authenticity.

However, close inspection has revealed the housing zone bid application contains a series of false and inaccurate claims submitted “in partnership” between Renewal and Lewisham council. Chief among these are:

• False claims of £2m funding from Sport England, repeated throughout the £20m public money grant application.

• Repeated mention of Onside Youth zones, a well-respected young person’s charity as a “key stakeholder” and in principle funder. Onside has told the Guardian it has no formal relationship with the scheme.

• Sport England mentioned 31 times in the documents and listed as having “significant financial involvement”. The same month the bid was submitted Sport England wrote to the Renewal-backed charity Surrey Canal Sports Foundation asking it to stop making such claims in its publicity.

• Repeated mentions of the former javelin world-record holder Steve Backley MBE as a director of the charity at the heart of the scheme. Companies House filings show Backley has never been a director of the Surrey Canal Sports Foundation. In the years since the bid was submitted his name and photo have been dropped from its publicity.

The revelation of false information in a grant application for £20m of public money will leave a series of grave unanswered questions. Most striking is the suggestion the false claims of Sport England funding remained uncorrected despite Sport England writing to the Surrey Canal Sports Foundation, whose directors include Bullock, in September 2014 asking it to stop claiming to have money “pledged”.

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It is hard to see how such a mistake could have been made by a developer in charge of a £1bn regeneration scheme. Similarly many observers will now ask how Lewisham council can even consider continuing in a relationship of trust with Renewal given the level of inaccurate detail in its funding documents.

The £20m grant to the New Bermondsey scheme was approved by Johnson amid much fanfare during his final year as mayor of London. Despite repeated requests from the Lewisham Labour council’s own scrutiny committee the bid application documents were never made public and never reviewed by anyone other than the council’s own senior officers. The documents have been made public only in the last week following repeated requests from the scrutiny committee, led by councillor Alan Hall, who has provided a lone questioning voice throughout.

In total the bid contains 31 mentions of Sport England. The application claims that the scheme has “significant financial investment from the developer (Renewal) and Sport England”. A letter from Surrey Canal Sports Foundation states “the foundation already has £12m in commitments from Sport England and the developer”.

In fact Sport England have no funding agreement in relation to the scheme nor is there an application in progress. Sport England told the Guardian: “ In 2010 we received a funding application from the Surrey Canal Sports Foundation but this was subsequently withdrawn in 2013. We therefore have no funding agreement, of any kind, in place with them.” Indeed the Guardian has learnt that in September 2014 Sport England wrote to Surrey Canal Sports Foundation and asked it to stop reporting that money had been pledged.

The bid document also states “so far £18.5m has been pledged, including commitments from … Onside.” Onside Youth Zones are described elsewhere as a “key stakeholder”. “The Onside youth zone will be 3,000 square metres, will be open 52 weeks a year,” the bid document states. Onside have told the Guardian: “We do not have a formal agreement with Surrey Canal Sports Foundation or Renewal regarding the development. In 2014 we explored the possibility of creating a new Youth Zone should their plans for a community sports facility progress.”

In baffling touch Backley, one of Britain’s leading Olympians, is pictured twice and mentioned three times as a trustee of the Surrey Canal Sports Foundation. There is no record of Backley ever having been on the board of the charitable company. Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson is also mentioned four times as a key trustee. Grey-Thompson has since resigned from the foundation following the false funding claims last month. Also gone from the Renewal-backed charity are the Southwark council leader, Peter John, and, as of Tuesday, mayor Bullock.

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For the last five years Millwall football club has questioned the suitability of a novice developer like Renewal taking part in such a major scheme, pointing instead to the club’s own willingness to help regenerate its immediate neighbourhood as a full partner in the scheme.

Further questions will now be asked of the basic due diligence of Lewisham’s cabinet, chief executive and head of law and the deputy mayor Alan Smith, the cabinet member for regeneration, who council minutes show signed off the housing bid document in March 2015, and whose competence would reasonably be expected to stretch to examining details of this scheme. A simple phone call to Sport England would have been enough to establish that no funding agreement was in place. There is no evidence any attempts have been made to correct the £20m mayor of London grant application in two and half years since it was submitted.

Similarly further questions will be asked about the close relationship between the council and Renewal, which has never completed a development of this scale and has no public evidence of its ability to do so. As a balm to this lack of clarity the “long-standing relationship” between Mushtaq Malik, CEO of Renewal, and Lewisham council was referred to in the council’s own due diligence report, prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Malik was in charge of providing various Lewisham council services in the mid-1990s, when he was a colleague of the current chief executive, Barry Quirk. Quirk has since told the Guardian he has no ongoing professional relationship with the Renewal CEO.

“On 30 September 2014 Renewal submitted an application to the GLA that sought £5m of Housing Zone grant funding towards the capital costs of constructing Energize,” read a statement from Renewal. “In that regard the bid document contained details and information concerning Energize and Sport England. Following discussions with the GLA, a revised bid was submitted on 21 November 2014, which removed the request for grant funding in respect of Energize, so as to be focussed entirely on the delivery of infrastructure for the project, namely the new station and the bus interchange. “These bid documents were prepared by Renewal in conjunction with Lewisham Council. The Housing Zone bid document of 21 November 2014 makes no reference to Sport England, and all sections of the 30 September 2014 bid document relating to Energize therefore became irrelevant for the purposes of the on-going process with the GLA.

“At no stage has Renewal nor the Surrey Canal Sports Foundation suggested to any third party that a legally binding funding agreement was in place with Sport EnglandIt has always been the case that numerous hurdles would need to be jumped and boxes ticked in order to turn the Sport England support into a concrete funding obligation. To that extent, neither Renewal nor the Surrey Canal Sports Foundation has had any intention to mislead anyone.

“However, Renewal acknowledges that it jumped the gun in referring to the clear support of Sport England in correspondence between 2011 and 2013 as a “pledge”. That was done in good faith, as that is how Renewal genuinely categorised the Sport England commitment – just like the £500K commitment from Lewisham, which is openly referred to as “a pledge”, but is equally subject to numerous hurdles, box ticking and full Mayor & Cabinet approval before turning into a binding commitment. In September 2014 Sport England emailed Renewal asking for the reference to “pledge” in an Energize brochure to be changed. Renewal accepts that it was slow out of the blocks in removing references to ‘pledge’ from the Sports Foundation website and ensuring that it was not repeated elsewhere, and Renewal apologises to Sport England for that.”

A spokesperson for Lewisham Council said: “The council provided a letter of support for the bid that Renewal made to GLA for the housing zone. An independent external review will look into issues that have been raised concerning the Surrey Canal Sports Foundation and New Bermondsey CPO. Once the review is complete, the outcome will be reported to full Council and made public.”