A regional daily removed a story from its website after a complaint to the press watchdog – despite standing by the piece’s accuracy.

Stoke-on-Trent daily the Sentinel deleted the piece from its site as a goodwill gesture after failing to resolve a complaint by Capen Ltd.

The Sentinel had reported on claims that an investigation had taken place after a charity lottery operator had taken payments for draws that had never happened.

The story was run under the headline ‘Investigation after Donna Louise lottery operator takes payments from 4,000 players for draws that were never held’, prompting Capen to complain to the Independent Press Standards Organisation.

Complaining under Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Editors’ Code of Practice, Capen claimed the story inaccurately inferred that it was taking payments on the charity’s behalf, whereas the lottery funds were collected using a merchant facility in the charity’s name and all the funds were settled directly to the charity’s nominated bank account.

The company added that these easily verifiable facts were omitted from the story.

Denying a breach of Code, The Sentinel said it was satisfied that all the information related to Capen in the story was accurate.

It did, however, offer to publish a statement from the company to add further clarification and address their concerns – an offer declined by Capen.

During IPSO’s investigation, Capen said that if the story was removed from The Sentinel’s site, this would resolve the matter to its satisfaction.

The Sentinel said it would be happy to do this as a gesture of goodwill and IPSO therefore discontinued its investigation. The full resolution statement can be read here.