You can get The National's Real Scottish Politics newsletter free and direct to your inbox every weekday.
PETER Murrell has pleaded guilty to embezzlement. But look at some corners of the Scottish press, and you’d be forgiven for thinking it was someone else who was on trial.
Despite Murrell’s crimes, it was Nicola Sturgeon who has found herself in the firing line of many of Scotland’s commentators and media outlets. This has led to debates about misogyny and questions over whether a woman should be held to account for a man’s crime. Those debates will not be rehearsed here.
For one, it is clear that Sturgeon has questions of her own to answer, and those questions are not about Murrell’s knick-knacks. Claims that the former SNP leader should have been suspicious that her husband could afford a PlayStation or a toilet seat are patently ridiculous.
Murrell was earning at times more than £100,000 per year, after all. These were things he could afford – and the list of items for which he embezzled funding reads like an escalating pattern, from small things to the more audacious, no doubt as he realised he could get away with it.
The focus instead must be on asking Sturgeon questions about things for which she does have responsibility: her own statements and leadership.
The irony is that perhaps the key question for the former first minister is the campervan – which has become something of a joke.
On Monday, amid speculative questions about “what she knew”, Sturgeon released her second of two statements on Murrell’s embezzlement.
She said she was “not aware” of many of his illicit purchases and “indeed in relation to the item of largest value – a campervan – I was not aware of its existence until it featured in the police investigation in early 2023”.
Is this a sustainable position?
Colin Beattie – the former SNP treasurer who like Sturgeon was arrested, questioned, but ultimately not charged during Operation Branchform – is on the record as saying he learned about the campervan from the party’s 2021 accounts.
The campervan does appear to be there, valued at £80,632 under the category “motor vehicles”. The previous year, 2020’s accounts, had no mention of any vehicles at all.
So, how did Sturgeon not notice? An asset worth £80,000 suddenly appeared on the books of the party she led, and she didn’t realise?
It is apparent oversights like this that have led critics such as former SNP MP Joanna Cherry to note a “remarkable lack of curiosity” in party finances on Sturgeon’s part.
But some of the former SNP leader’s fiercest critics – former Alba MP Neale Hanvey for example – would do well to remember questions must not only be asked of her leadership.
Murrell’s crimes began in 2010 and covered both the SNP’s first majority in 2011 and the independence referendum in 2014 – all under First Minister Alex Salmond.
If Sturgeon “must have” noticed irregularities in her party’s finances, should Salmond have not?
Then there is John Swinney, now the First Minister, who served as Sturgeon’s deputy for nine years and Salmond’s finance secretary before that. He was leader when Murrell was appointed chief executive and will have seen the next two decades of his work up close.
Ultimately, there are questions for all of the top brass of the SNP.
However, not least among them is the one which started all of this but ironically remains unanswered: where is the “missing £600,000”?
It is easy to forget that the police interest in the SNP finances began back in 2021 when activist Sean Clerkin called them in to investigate how the money raised and “ring-fenced” to fight a second independence referendum had been used.
SNP accounts showed the party had just £260,565 in cash at the end of 2020, up from £96,854 at the end of 2019.
In June 2021, then-treasurer Beattie confirmed that £666,953 had been “raised through the independence-related appeals and coded as such through the internal process”.
He said that the SNP had applied £51,760 of expenditure against that money, which should have left some £615,000 in a ring-fenced pot.
By 2022, the SNP accounts said that £740,822 had been raised “through the independence-related appeals” and £253,335 of it spent, leaving £487,487.
So, where was it? And where is it?
Four years on, we have Murrell’s embezzlement conviction, but not a word about where that money has gone.
The closest we appear to have to an explanation is Beattie’s 2021 statement, in which he basically seemed to say the SNP had spent it, but also written reminders to themselves to “earmark” future expenditure on indyref2 as if it had come from the £600k.
That does not explain what the money was spent on. Without a police investigation to “prejudice”, SNP leaders should now have to answer.
