He said knowledge about the identification and development of two related injectable compounds claimed to have the potential to provide a pain-free and wound-free alternative to mulesing was restricted to a tight group within AWI to ensure a trouble-free scientific evaluation and, hopefully, commercial release as early as next year.

Mr van Rooyen was responding to a story published in Rural Press weekly farming papers on August 21 in which national wool writer, Marius Cuming, suggested the AWI chairman was back-pedalling on a public commitment made a few weeks earlier that he would ensure much greater transparency and accountability at AWI.

The claim appeared in a story about the injectable compounds whose existence weren't known to some AWI board members until they read about them in the media.

AWI has the job of finding commercial alternatives to protect sheep against breech flystrike before the December 2010 deadline to phase out surgical mulesing.

Mr van Rooyen said he had kept a tight rein on information about the compounds – which will soon be thoroughly tested by departments of agriculture around the nation starting in South Australia – because of widely known problems and divisions within the AWI board.

"I find it amazing your correspondent (Mr Cuming) can accuse me of a lack of transparency when he knows that within the AWI board we have serious conflicts of interest, within the AWI board we have serious breaches of board confidence, and within the AWI board we have unauthorised and inappropriate contact with animal rights movements overseas," Mr van Rooyen said.

"How could he have expected us to have kept the whole board and the whole company advised of this very important development – a critical development for the Australian wool industry as another alternative to mulesing – when those problems existed on the AWI board.

"Those are serious issues and there was a good reason why it (the mulesing alternative) was kept to so few people. The whole industry understands that."