Winchester City Council is being criticised for not being open enough about its investigations into the collapse of a charity in which it had a huge financial interest.

Accountant, Robin Atkins, from Alresford, claims that the council has failed to supply him with two documents about the crash of the Winchester Alliance for Mental Health, which he requested under the new Freedom of Information Act. The council says it is not obliged to do so and claims it is being as open as possible about the matter.

"At the moment, I'm getting nowhere. They appear to be attempting to stop these things coming out in public," said Mr Atkins, who is chairman of Alresford Town Council. The collapse of the charity left city taxpayers more than £350,000 out of pocket.

The payroll services for the charity, which provided help for people with mental health problems and ran a drop-in centre in Parchment Street, Winchester, were provided by the city council but, after years of financial problems, its debt to the authority rocketed and WAMH went into liquidation just before Christmas.

A liquidator's report is expected to be sent to the Department of Trade and Industry soon.

The city council has also commissioned an independent audit from PriceWaterhouseCoopers which it hopes will shed more light on what went wrong. Between November, 2002, and January, 2004, the debt rose from £76,000 to £385,000 after the charity failed to meet monthly repayments. The authority believed the service was invaluable to users. But Mr Atkins says the city council should go further and has asked to see copies of documents which he believes show that it supported lending money to the charity.

"If there are letters of support from the council, I want to see them and I want to see who authorised them," he said.

City secretary and solicitor, Stephen Whetnall, confirmed that Mr Atkins had made a request but he said that it would be inappropriate to release the information while there was an independent audit.

"Under the Act, if there's an external auditor looking at it, it's not appropriate to release further documents at this stage."

Mr Whetnall said there were a number of cases under the law where the authority did not have to reveal everything and this was one of them. He added that a "considerable" amount of information had been made public already through a report to the Principle Scrutiny Committee and through questions raised at meetings and that all comments and letters submitted by Mr Atkins were being passed on to the auditors.