Ross Martin, chief executive of the public-private Scottish Council for Development and Industry (SCDI) which leads the partnership, has raised eyebrows in the sector by claiming not to know whether any of the 37 investment projects listed in the SCA’s recent prospectus had attracted any investment.

Martin, who chairs the SCA’s leadership group, added that he expected a “good number” of the projects to come to fruition within 10 years: “I am aware that a lot of work is under way and I’m confident, from previous experience on local government and the private sector, that this will bear fruit as the market strengthens.”

Last month, the SCA declined to tell the Sunday Herald whether or not it had raised any funds after investing £300,000 attending six property fairs in the UK and abroad since June last year, prompting a freedom of information request. The SCA’s formal response to the request was that it does not hold any information on investment raised to date.

Meanwhile, the Scottish Government would not say whether or not it had set the SCA any targets in return for a budget allocation of £7m. So far, £3m of the budget has been approved and £1.6m spent.

The SCA, which employs three full-time and three part-time staff, was launched by then cities minister Nicola Sturgeon in December 2011 with the stated aim of maximising investment, stimulating economic activity and creating jobs in Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Inverness, Perth and Stirling. The plan was for the body to pool marketing efforts to attract a projected £10 billion of investment from both domestic and international investors for projects such as the Dundee Waterfront, the Edinburgh St James Quarter development and a business park at Inverness Airport.

Property expert Peter Muir of Colliers International said it was “bizarre” that a publicly funded organisation claims not to hold any information indicating how well it is doing. He said: “Given the outlay, I would have thought there would be some sort of return to show by now and that the Scottish Government would have set some form of targets.”

James Kelly MSP, Labour’s spokesman for cities, also criticised SCA’s inability to provide figures.

He said: “Organisations such as the alliance [should be] transparent as to what success they are actually having, otherwise taxpayers will rightly question what benefit they are seeing from millions of public funding.”

Conservative finance spokesman Gavin Brown MSP said: “After three years the SCA should have some idea of whether it is on track. If they don’t know how much investment has been attracted and can’t provide a breakdown, they are basically saying they have no idea how they have been doing.”

In an interview with the Sunday Herald, Ross Martin of the SCDI said the global economic downturn had reduced the amount of capital available for property investments, but the situation had begun to improve in the last few months. He added that the alliance had had to compete on the international stage with other city groupings, many of them more longstanding than the SCA. Nevertheless, he said the SCA’s programme was “roughly on schedule”.

Martin said once significant pledges of investment had been made and it was likely that a project would go ahead, this would be “loudly trumpeted”, but it was important that sensitive discussions with potential investors are not jeopardised by publishing information too soon.

The SCA’s current strategic implementation plan contains a “high-level programme” of activity. The expected outcome is the achievement by 2016 of “new investment into cities creating direct and indirect employment”.