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Owen Gibson 

London 2012 organisers have been accused by London Assembly members of running a "closed oligopoly" with a "chronic lack of transparency" after refusing to provide a breakdown of ticket sales.

A London Assembly report last month criticised the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (Locog) for not laying to rest concerns over the number of tickets available to the public for blue riband events by publishing a detailed breakdown, and the assembly member Dee Doocey said it is guilty of "obsessive secrecy".

After questioning Lord Coe, the London 2012 chair, and the chief executive, Paul Deighton, she said it was "shameful" that Locog would not provide the information.

Deighton confirmed that the overall number of tickets available for the session including the 100m final, once "seat kills" for the big screens, media positions and the like had been taken into account, is only 58,500 despite the capacity of the stadium being listed at 80,000.

Of the reduced capacity, 4,500 were removed for the big screens, 10,000 for the media, 2,000 for athletes and their families, 2,000 for other accredited officials and 3,000 because they are obstructed by camera positions.

Of the remaining tickets, he claimed 21,000 had been made available to the British public in the first two sales phases and more than 7,000 would be sold next month. But he argued that a large proportion of the remaining total – split between overseas visitors, sponsors and National Olympic Committees – would find their way into the hands of the British public.

British buyers have been able to apply for tickets allocated to other European countries under European Commission rules and Deighton said many sponsors' tickets were being given away in competitions and to staff. Locog has argued that, with almost four million tickets left to sell across the Olympics and Paralympics, it would provide a misleading picture to break down the sales now. It has promised to do so once all tickets are sold, which is likely to be after the Games.

The assembly member John Biggs said: "It's what we perceive as a chronic lack of transparency. It seems like a closed oligopoly presenting things on a non-transparent and non-democratic basis." Doocey said Locog was the most secretive organisation she had encountered in eight years at City Hall and queried why the organising committee could not deliver the information on tickets sold so far.

Coe and Deighton, appearing before the London Assembly for the final time before the Games, offered a robust defence of their stance. "This is a very complicated process. To give you information in a running commentary would at worst be inaccurate and be frankly misleading," said Coe. "I'm not going to divert the attention of my teams, who have four million tickets to sell and revenue targets to meet. I'm not going to take them off that focus to work on [calculating] every single client group for every single session."

He said Locog would deliver on all of its promises – namely to get 75% of the 8.8m total into the hands of British public, with two-thirds at £50 or less and "proportionate numbers of tickets at every price point". He added: "We are being entirely transparent here and we are determined to get through the ticketing process."

The final batch of 1.3m tickets will go on sale in late April, with priority given to those who were unsuccessful in the first phase of sales. There are also around 1.5m football tickets remaining, while several hundred thousand tickets across all events will be released for sale in public box offices until the opening ceremony as seat configurations are finalised.

It is understood the calculations in most of the other venues are roughly the same as in the main stadium. That means that around a fifth of the quoted capacity is unusable before a single ticket has been sold. In the 6,000 capacity velodrome, that equates to a net capacity of only 4,500. If around half the tickets have been made available in the public sale, that equates to only 2,250 tickets on offer on the biggest nights.

In some venues, such as Wembley Arena, which will host badminton and rhythmic gymnastics, the number of "seat kills" is higher (30%) while at Wembley Stadium it is only 6%.

Deighton insisted the tickets available to the public had been equally divided between the four or five price points on offer. In those sessions where there were five price points, he said the number available in each would range from 18% to 22% of the total.

"We have not indulged in what the airlines would call yield management. We could, based on demand, push up the price of the tickets that are left and they would be bought. We are not doing that," he said.

Locog expects the number of tickets available to remain fluid until the Games because of the unprecedented number of temporary venues that have to be constructed.

Deighton defended the use of a firm in Arkansas to print 11m Olympic and Paralympic tickets. He said the firm had won an "open, competitive and detailed" tender process and offered the best value for money. He claimed 94% of contracts had gone to British firms. Guardian