SCOTTISH Labour’s Jenny Marra has been criticised for falsely claiming the beleaguered former chief executive of NHS Tayside was getting a £300,000 pay off.

The true figure was still a whopping, but significantly smaller, £90,000.

READ MORE: Tory MSP forgets his own tweet as he furiously attacks NHS Tayside

Lesley McLay announced she was leaving her post last week, after having been on sick leave since April.

Her position was described as untenable after it emerged that the troubled board – which has been bailed out with £45 million of Holyrood loans in recent years, and which will require a further £12.7m for 2017-18, had used donations from the public to pay IT costs.

McLay’s sick leave started the day after she was told she could not continue at the crisis-hit board

On Monday, Marra claimed that the health boss had received a golden goodbye package worth more than £300,000.

The health board said that was “categorically untrue”.

According to reports on BBC Scotland yesterday, the actual pay off is £90,000 including pension contributions.

SNP MSP Sandra White, pictured below, who sits on Holyrood’s Health Committee, said Marra needed to retract the “baseless claims” and explain where she got the £300,000 figure from.

The National: Sandra White has replaced party colleague Gordon Macdonald after Nicola Sturgeon's call for better gender balance

“Jenny Marra must now retract these utterly bogus and baseless claims after the health board has proven them to be utterly false,” she said.

“We are used to this sort of thing from Labour, as they continually seek to mislead when it comes to the NHS in Scotland.

“But Ms Marra’s claims aren’t just wrong and misleading, they are wildly off the mark – and it appears to be a deliberate attempt to undermine our health service.

“People have legal entitlements and the NHS simply cannot refuse to make those payments, but as Tayside has said throughout there has been no ‘payoff’ or golden goodbye as Ms Marra claimed.

“Jenny Mara must now apologise and publicly retract her baseless claims – as well as setting out on what basis she made them.”

But Marra, who chairs the Scottish Parliament’s Public Audit committee, said that McLay’s “huge severance payment” was still not appropriate.

She added: “SNP politicians should explain to their constituents why they think it is acceptable for a health board that has been chronically underfunded by their own government to reward failure.

“If NHS Tayside had been honest about the extent of this pay off in the first place, the board could have gone some way to starting to rebuild trust with patients and staff.

“Instead, it has now been forced to release this information that should have been made public in the first place.

“I look forward to seeing Audit Scotland’s opinion on this payment when they publish their latest emergency report in September on the financial mess at NHS Tayside.”

A spokeswoman for NHS Tayside said the payments were legal and contractual entitlements: “NHS Tayside chairman John Brown has written to Jenny Marra in her capacity as convener of the Public Audit and Post-legislative Scrutiny Committee to provide details of the payments issued to former chief executive Ms Lesley McLay on the termination of her employment.”