THE Scottish Liberal Democrats have been fined for filing an inaccurate spending return for the 2016 Holyrood election.

The Electoral Commission said the national party had wrongly aggregated 10 items of spending worth almost £1950 in the knife-edge Edinburgh Western constituency.

The watchdog said the LibDems bundled together payments that should have been identified individually “as required by the law”, hampering transparency

It meant it was “not possible to identify” some of the expenditure.

The LibDems paid a £500 fine for "failure to deliver accurate spending return for 2016 Scottish Parliament election" last week.

Previously held by the SNP, Edinburgh Western was a top LibDem target and the contest to win became of the most intense and bitter of the election.

A row over the finances of Michelle Thomson, the former SNP MP for the equivalent Westminster seat of Edinburgh West, was eagerly exploited by the LibDems.

LibDem Alex Cole-Hamilton won the seat by 2960 votes after spending £32,549 on his campaign, just below the legal limit, compared to £18,593 by his SNP rival Toni Giugliano.

In Edinburgh’s five other seats, the average spend by LibDem candidates was £924.

After a police investigation and a referral to the Procurator Fiscal, Mr Cole-Hamilton was informed in October he would not be prosecuted over his expenses.

He was also told by the Commission that he had not breached the rules of apportioning his leaflet expenditure in the seat.

Overall, the Scottish LibDems spent £186,000 on party-level campaigning across Scotland at the election, but was fined over £1949.27 items in just one seat: Edinburgh Western.

Bob Posner, Director of Political Finance and Regulation & Legal Counsel at the Electoral Commission, said: “Political parties and campaigners must provide accurate and transparent spending returns so that they can be scrutinised by voters.

“In this case, the party aggregated some payments rather than declaring each payment individually as required by the law.

“As a result it was not possible to identify some of them, resulting in less transparency.”

A Scottish LibDem spokesperson said: “This is a small penalty for a technical fault on the declaration of our election returns.

All funds were accounted for but they should have been disaggregated.”