Glasgow council has ordered an independent investigation after retiring senior officials secured six-figure boosts to their pensions.

The city’s leader, Susan Aitken, and her deputy, Ricky Bell, are understood to be furious over the exit deals - which they did not approve.

Opposition councillors are also unhappy with enhanced retirement terms given to the local authority’s former chief executive, Annemarie O’Donnell, and another official.

The council on Tuesday announced it would ask a KC and external auditors to review the deals to ensure they were within the rules. 

But elected members from the ruling SNP and Labour - the main opposition party - have signalled they would not have approved the terms if they had known about them.

A Glasgow SNP source told The Herald: “These officers who awarded themselves enhancements to their already generous pensions did it behind the backs of elected politicians because they knew perfectly well there was no way they would have been signed off by senior councillors. 

“This kind of thing used to happen regularly at Glasgow City Council but officers know that the SNP administration takes a very dim view of it and have made clear their expectation that this kind of behaviour should have ended. 

Annemarie O'Donnell

“It’s a massive breach of trust and an insult to the vast majority of Council staff who can’t put these kinds of fixes in place for themselves.”

Ms O’Donnell retired in May when she was 59. Her departure deal - which was not put before councillors for approval - included her being allowed to start collecting her pension early.

This created what is called a “strain” on the local government pension fund.  The council - to compensate for this strain - had to boost her pension contributions in her final full year of employment to more than £357,000. This money went to the pension fund, not Ms O’Donnell.

Another outgoing official, Elaine Galletly, former director of Legal and Administration, got a nearly £60,000 payment for compensation for loss of office.  Her annual pension contributions were bumped up to just over £223,000. 

There have been previous exit packages for senior executives that have forced the council to compensation the pension fund for “strain”. 

However, it is understood that councillors only learned of their pension pot boosts when they saw the city’s annual accounts. 

Aitken and other elected members in the council’s leadership did not want O’Donnell to leave. The official is said to have been respected by both colleagues and councillors. 

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Insiders said they would not have approved her departure on such terms if they had been given a say. 

Elected members are now asking for new rules to be put in place to ensure pension deals have to be signed off by politicians, not officials.  

A spokesman for the local authority said: “Glasgow City Council has never had a process whereby enhanced terms for individual senior officers are approved by councillors, and therefore it was not approved by the leader or any member of the administration. 

"The leader has instructed the chief executive to put in place a new process to ensure that councillors are at the very least consulted in advance of any such service reform and have a role in approving them. 

"She has also instructed the chief executive to look into whether our existing approval processes have been properly followed.

“The chief executive has alerted the council’s external auditors and is engaging a KC to carry out a review of the full circumstances leading to the approval of these payments.”

George Redmond, Labour’s leader on the city council, sought to blame the SNP for the generosity of the deals.

He told the Daily Record: “Glasgow’s financial position is clear to everyone - it’s in a dire situation. Financial mismanagement by the  SNP at every level of government has led to this. 

“The reasons for these massive payments and the calculations of them is not clear at all. We need to understand what political oversight there was on this, who authorised these payments and who gave the go-ahead.

“Public money needs to be accountable to the people of Glasgow  - there needs to be some light in the black hole here - people need to - and deserve to - know the truth.”