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PEOPLE are “going to hate” David Henry for reporting Yes Scotland to the police, he admits.
But the former SNP branch secretary told The National that he could not “ignore” what he claimed to have found in the official pro-independence campaign’s accounts.
His said his discoveries, which have been shared with Police Scotland, showed there was a sum of £1.5 million unaccounted for in Yes Scotland’s books .
Yes Scotland said previously that the organisation had been inactive since 2014 and that the apparently missing £1.5m was down to a change in accounts.
Asked why he had shared his findings with the police now, more than a decade on from the referendum, Henry said he had only recently found himself reviewing Yes Scotland’s accounts.
His suspicions had been raised by the SNP’s rejection of calls for any further investigation into their finances after Peter Murrell's sentencing for embezzling £400,000 from the party while its chief executive.
He said: “I thought, ‘Why are they not wanting an investigation? Is there something else being hidden? And I just started, I don’t know why, I don’t know how I ended up looking up Yes Scotland Ltd but I did.”
Henry, who is not an accountant but has experience doing the books for organisations he is involved with such as the Scottish Sovereignty Research Group, said that the alleged shortfall was quickly obvious to him.
And while Yes Scotland has said that it was independent of the SNP, there have been previous questions raised about the links between the two organisations.
The party bailed out the Yes campaign at the end of the independence referendum campaign, it was revealed in Electoral Commission records released the year after the vote.
The SNP donated a total of £825,000 to Yes Scotland in 2014 as the campaign entered its final stages and in the aftermath.
And there have been questions posed about Green co-leader Ross Greer’s claim to have been awarded a 25% pay bump while working for Yes Scotland after Peter Murrell, then the chief executive of the SNP, “kicked off” about how the then-activist was “massively underpaid” compared to his colleagues.
Henry said that Murrell had thrived in a culture of secrecy within the SNP during his time at the top in what some critics have described as a “wheesht for indy” approach.
He told The National: “It’s that environment that’s so dangerous, because if there is there a crook in amongst you, wheesht for indy is the perfect cover for them to get away with it.”
Far from damaging the independence movement, Henry said he hoped that increased transparency would revitalise it.
He added: “What I want to see out of this is the Yes campaign get back on its feet and for this never to happen again. I think this could be, actually, a focal point to wake people up and get them on their feet.”
Before making his report to the police, he said he had his interpretation checked and weighed the risks to his own reputation, adding: “I did think twice about, ‘What is this going to do to people that have supported independence all their lives?’ They’re going to hate me. But you can’t ignore it.”
Henry told The National he was convinced that reporting Yes Scotland to the police was the right thing to do after seeing SNP leader and First Minister John Swinney batting away calls for a public inquiry into the party’s finances .
He said: “How can you repair the damage if all you’re doing is telling people to stop asking questions about it? Which is exactly what got us into this mess in the first place.”
The SNP have previously stressed that Yes Scotland was a separate organisation and that the party had been found to have been the victim of the “criminal actions of Peter Murrell”.
