A former SNP councillor in Edinburgh has been severely reprimanded by a tribunal for accepting £1,500 in cash from a Nationalist colleague.

The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) also ordered Jim Orr to pay £6,000 in costs after ruling he breached integrity rules over the money received from former council deputy leader Steve Cardownie.

He was sanctioned even though he repaid the sum to Cardownie and publicised the payment himself.

In 2012 Orr, at that point an SNP councillor in the Capital, lost a special allowance as vice convener of a local authority committee.

He did not consent to the removal of the extra payment and his council income fell from £22,000 to £16,000.

The chartered accountant was appointed vice-chair of the Forth Estuaries Transport Authority, but he was still earning less than he had previously.

Cardownie, who combined the roles of deputy council leader and SNP group leader, offered to help make up the shortfall by giving Orr £1,500 from his own pocket.

Orr, who was reluctant to accept the cash, said he would agree to the arrangement so long as Cardownie gave it directly to a family in Kiev he knew.

Orr later wrote: “I’d spent two weeks of the previous year teaching English in Eastern Europe and already planned to help out the family I had stayed with.

“I knew their youngest kid needed to pay college fees and so I very reluctantly decided to [make] a counter-proposal…that if Cardownie paid the money directly to her, without me touching it, then I would consider the matter closed.”

Cardownie declined and Orr accepted £1,500 in twenty pound notes from the deputy leader in January 2013, after which Orr himself transferred the money to the family.

The deputy leader later recalled: “I was helping a colleague who had lost his SRA [allowance]. It was a genuine attempt to help Jim Orr. He was one and a half [£1,500] short.

“I was getting 35 grand a year in total. It was an effort to cushion the blow for Jim. He wanted me to send it to Kiev. I wasn’t going to do that."

However, Orr regretted agreeing to the Cardownie payment and later returned the money to him, despite already handing over the original sum to the family in Kiev. He accepted £1,500 from another councillor, which he also returned.

He self-referred the Cardownie payment to the Commissioner for Ethical Standards in Public Life - an ethics watchdog - who decided the issue was not covered by the councillors’ code of conduct. The police also concluded it was not a criminal matter.

After Orr, who resigned the SNP whip in 2014 and sat as an independent councillor for the remainder of his term, made details of the payment public, a complaint was made about him to the ICAEW.

The Institute, established by Royal Charter in the nineteenth century, has over 150,000 members and upholds industry standards.

According to the ICAEW website, a tribunal of the body’s disciplinary committee upheld a complaint that Orr breached section 100.5a of their ethics code by accepting the payment.

This section of the rules states: “Integrity - to be straightforward and honest in all professional and business relationships.”

The ruling noted: “The tribunal ordered that Mr Orr be severely reprimanded and pay costs of £6,000.”

Orr is no longer a councillor or an SNP member. Speaking to the Herald on Sunday, he said: “Explaining the culture and practices of Edinburgh Council to a panel of London barristers and accountants is not something I'd want to do twice in my life. For example, although gifts of cash and allowances were exchanged from time to time between councillors, and this is rarely a good idea, it was generally supported by officer advice - but never formally in writing”.

“Personally I had colleagues encouraging me to take cash gifts or compensation within a few months of my election. I fought alone against every aspect of such payments and returned the money as soon as practicable each time. But just handling it was, for obvious reasons, considered worthy of a severe reprimand. The city chambers was anything but a safe space for those of us with valuable reputations to protect.”

He added: “Within two years [of getting elected] I had resigned the whip incurring substantial damage to my health, career and reputation in the process. Yet the only person to be censured was me.”

Edinburgh Council declined to comment.