The chief executive of the Student Loans Company (SLC), the organisation responsible for administering loans to over six million students and graduates in the UK, has been dismissed from his post after publicly criticising the organisation.

Steve Lamey was found guilty of having breached “ethical standards expected of public office holders” by a Whitehall inquiry, which lead to his suspension in July. His dismissal from the role was announced last week, with no reason given by SLC for their decision.

The ruling of the Whitehall inquiry came after a conference of university administrators at which Lamey branded the SLC a “mess”.

A disciplinary report seen by The Times shows that Lamey was also found to have exaggerated the number of calls from students that were mishandled by the company. He told the conference that 50% of calls were mishandled. However, according to this report, this figure only held true for peak periods at the beginning of each academic year. Outside of these times, the report said, the rate of call mishandling was one in five.

As chief executive of the SLC, a government-run, not-for-profit organisation, Lamey was paid £200,000 a year. His suspension came just a year after his appointment to the role.

In an interview with The Times, Lamey, 60, criticised what he called the “trumped-up charges to discredit him”. He accused Whitehall of having “hung him out to dry” after he made moves to reform the organisation. He sad that senior figures in Whitehall were guilty of “sweeping the failures of the organisation under the carpet” rather than solving problems at the beleaguered organisation.

“Almost all of the allegations against me were made by disgruntled staff who were upset with the way in which I was changing the organisation and who had received poor performance reviews,” he said.

The Whitehall investigation agreed that Lamey, a former chief operations officer at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, had been responsible for making “a real and positive difference” at the SLC. Many of the SLC’s current difficulties, including a “remote, aloof leadership team” and a “lack of customer focus”, predated Lamey’s appointment, the report said. Prior to his arrival, the SLC faced criticism regarding poor customer service, inefficiency, and allegations that they had sent fake debt collection notices to students.

The report also suggested that the SLC was struggling to combat problems of bullying, low morale and high sickness rates, with staff missing an average of 16 working days per year due to sickness. It cited the findings of an audit carried out by McKinsey & Company, a management consultancy firm, which discovered that the SLC was ranked in the bottom 10% of all organisations it assessed in 35 out of 36 criteria.

While praising the positive progress he had instigated, the report suggested Lamey was guilty of inappropriate behaviour towards staff, including incidents of swearing during a performance assessment and a “failure to control bad behaviour amongst the executive leadership team”. Of the 58 allegations made against Lamey, only six were upheld by the internal investigation.

Despite these issues, Lamey earned a glowing performance review from Christian Brodie, the SLC’s chairman, praising Lamey, for having “re-energised the business” and shown “sound and effective leadership qualities”.

Lamey told The Times: “The department and the board seem to have gone out of their way to destroy my reputation. I can only conclude that they were more interested in hiding the chronic problems [of the] SLC rather than facing up to them in public.”

In response to Lamey's allegations, the SLC said he had been dismissed “following investigations into allegations about aspects of his management and leadership”. It added: “The investigations covered a range of different allegations with a number upheld. It would be inappropriate to comment on individual findings within the report”