A defiant Nicola Sturgeon has said she is “not going to apologise for somebody else’s crimes” after her estranged husband admitted embezzling more than £400,000 from the SNP she led.
Speaking after former SNP chief executive Peter Murrell pleaded guilty this week to embezzling the sum between 2010 and 2022, Ms Sturgeon became emotional as said she thinks it will take her a “very, very long time to recover” from his actions.
The 61-year-old spent the money on items including a motorhome, cars, kitchen gadgets, expensive watches and pens, and more mundane purchases such as hand cream and toilet seats.
He is set to be sentenced in June, the same month that the SNP faces two by-election contests – one in Aberdeen South and another in Arbroath and Broughty Ferry.
The SNP has faced calls for an independent inquiry into its finances.
Ms Sturgeon, who has insisted she knew nothing of his crimes and said he only told her he was pleading guilty last week, was Scotland’s first minister from 2014 to 2023, while Mr Murrell served as the SNP chief executive from 2001 to 2023.
In an interview on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme, Ms Sturgeon said she is “not going to apologise for somebody else’s crimes”.
“For my own sake, but for the sake of people out there, a lot of women who end up finding themselves blamed for the actions of the men in their lives, I’m not going to contribute to that kind of sense that I am responsible for somebody else’s crimes,” she said.
“I will take responsibility for the things I do, the decisions I make. I’m sitting here with you right now, answering questions because I believe strongly in that accountability.
“But I am not responsible for the crimes that my former husband committed, and I’m not going to apologise for somebody else’s crimes.”
Ms Sturgeon continued: "What he has done to me, I think, will take me a very, very long time to recover from.
“I have been deceived, I’ve been lied to, I’ve been betrayed, as it turns out, over a lengthy period of time by somebody I thought I knew, by somebody I loved, by somebody I trusted.”
“Because of his actions, I was subjected to a two-year police investigation”, she said. “I was exonerated. If there had been a shred of evidence that I had been complicit in this or had known about what he was doing, then I wouldn’t have been cleared.
“But despite being cleared, I’ve still spent a week with having the finger of suspicion pointed at me. Yes, I’m angry, but I’m also carrying a degree of hurt, and I think a degree of trauma about this whole episode that resulted in me sitting in a police station under arrest.”
Ms Sturgeon also said that she did not question her former husband’s purchases as the couple were both on high salaries and she thought their incomes would have supported anything she saw in her house.
She told the BBC: “I was working round the clock most days, I wasn’t at home very often, I didn’t take much, if anything, to do with the administration of our household.
“I mean, just to explain how our finances worked, we had separate bank accounts, I never had any access to his bank account, he didn’t have any to mine, every month I would pass him a sum of money to cover my share of the household expenses and leave him to it.”
Ms Sturgeon previously said she had been “completely cleared and exonerated” by police and that she had been lied to by her former husband.
“He perpetrated a crime on the SNP,” she told the BBC. “By definition, that included me as the party leader. He misled. He deceived.
“He is serving and will be serving a sentence for a crime he committed. I’m out here feeling as if I’m serving a sentence for a crime I did not commit.”
