Nicola Sturgeon STILL didn't know her husband stole £400,000

Well this goes to motive as to why Murrell did it. We don’t know. We do know that he didn’t just buy luxuries, but a vast amount of humble stuff like loo rolls and handcream.

The benefit to the lifestyle is clear. You have more cash to build assets like houses and so on. So Sturgeon may have known little about it. But the benefits in terms of her assets on divorce are there - Murrell using this account as a subsidy for their lives means she is actually better off!

I think Sturgeon got arsey when quizzed about the main marital home, the one in Uddingston which was searched by Police. That may have to be sold - but given that she has moved out and the marriage is over, is that a big deal to her?

It’s an asset of the marriage in all probability, I wonder why this is in part why Sturgeon felt so uncomfortable when asked about a contribution. I do not know what the legal position is in Scotland; but there could be recovery of assets, which could take priority over divorce?

Smells.

I don't think it was a whole villa. I think his parents owned a timeshare, which then passed to Peter and his sister.

Apparently Murrell sold a Portuguese villa shortly after being awarded legal aid for his defence.

It really does matter if Sturgeon is still married to this man. How can you dispose of a whole asset like a villa and not know? And what happened to the proceeds?

Even I - with my O Grade in Accounting from 1990 - understand the different between a balance sheet and expenditure statement.

Yes, which suggested that she didn't understand what she was reading, which is rather worrying given that she was First Minister.

The 'motor vehicles' heading is in the balance sheet, so can only refer to an asset controlled by the organisation.

In her interview Nicola Sturgeon said the SNP did habitually hire (and perhaps buy - I can’t recall) vehicles for campaigning purposes.

So since the cost was just listed as “motor vehicles” the assumption was this was just a cost for van and bus hire and so on. She did note there were multiple elections in this period, so that would have made it seem more plausible.

They owned no other vehicles, so what did they think the money had been spent on?

My understanding was that there was just the asset category of “motor vehicles”, nothing about a “battle bus” (which would be a very odd accounting category). I could be wrong.

Yes, but none of that changes the fact that the 'battle bus' was listed in the accounts as an asset owned by the SNP.

I understand that they wouldn't have approved the purchase of a motorhome for Murrell's personal use, but reading the accounts, they thought they had spent £125K on a 'battle bus'.

Did they not wonder where it was parked? Who had the keys? Were they not concerned about whether it was insured? taxed? Did nobody suggest selling it to raise cash? It remained in the accounts throughout Humza Yousaf's leadership and was still in the last set of accounts when they were submitted to the Electoral Commission in July 2025

The argument is supposed to be that it didn't matter that the indyref fundraiser money wasn't spent on a referendum, because everything they spent contributed towards the campaign for independence. However, their lack of interest in the whereabouts of the battle bus suggests that nobody cared if they had driven £125K off a cliff.

Perhaps the reason is that the police investigation quickly revealed that the motorhome was dodgy, but if they knew that, why is it still in the accounts?

I think that’s exactly what has happened.

Money out £XXX - Receipts tally £XXX

Those figures match, everything has a code, sign off.

When I was still at school I worked for a house builders and the cheques needed two signatures. For most of the cheques the directors looked at the paperwork with it, either a purchase order or receipt, but if the cheque was raised at the request of another director they just signed without a glance. When a new MD came in they brought in a rule that the director who’d raised the request couldn’t sign the cheque. I was just a junior junior but the number of cheques decreased quite considerably!!

And actually that raises another question; what did the dealership think of all this? How do people normally buy their vehicles? Surely not like that. It must have been somewhat surprising to them to have all these payments coming from different accounts. Are there any anti-money laundering regulations around large purchases like this? I'm surprised it didn't raise suspicion.

From the information publicly available at the moment, Murrell considerably muddied the waters with false invoices, split payments, and different stories told at different times.

He created a false invoice for the motor home where it was described as a van, split the payments for it over five transactions using both a charge card and direct transfers, and then gave different explanations of it at different times depending on what people had found out.

@nicepotoftea it’s almost like all of the signatories to those accounts, didn’t even give them a cursory glance before ok-ing them….

I know I keep wittering on about the 'battle bus', but Swinney has just said again that the SNP could spend the referendum money as it wished because everything they do is for independence.

But from the evidence available to him, £125k of the SNP's money was spent on a motor vehicle that had just disappeared, and nobody was concerned.

Was nobody wondering why they weren't using the 'battle bus' for campaigning in the Scottish and UK elections that have occurred since it was added to the accounts?

Oopsie.

“All the major parties – including the SNP – are committed to splitting the Lord Advocate's role, but little concrete action has been taken despite this having been flagged up as an issue since the 2000s.”

well if that isn’t a metaphor for Scotland these days I don’t know what is…

https://www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/politics/dorothy-bain-peter-murrell-unwittingly-37239012

The press would have announced it, they’ll be watching the indexes like an absolute hawk.

'The judge, Lord Young, wants a criminal justice social work report before sentencing - an assessment of Murrell's background, circumstances and risk.
These normally take three to four weeks to prepare.
He ordered one last week - so the case has been "continued" for reports, with the mitigation and sentencing expected at a hearing on 23 June..'

Mitigation plea/sentencing on 23rd June.

As far as I'm aware support for independence stays roughly the same, no matter the vagaries of SNP support. However, that might have changed with recent events.

(very roughly 50/50)

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1170409/scottish-independence/

They don’t need many voters though because the unionist vote is split and the Indy vote isn’t. They just need enough people who think that Indy is a good idea and deliverable. UK economists etc don’t really takes Indy seriously because they find it such a laughably bad idea and so they don’t even start to debunk the nationalists saying that Indy will be fine. If more debunking went on then maybe the electorate would be better informed. For instance if you go on nationalist twitter you’ll find many people think Scotland funds rUK, when it’s clearly the other way around. It’s not in the SNP’s best interest to clarify this and so people are left to think this clearly untrue thing is true.

So 30% of Scot’s probably do think Indy would be fine…

It's an assumption, based on the public announcement that they were separating and going to be divorced, and the media calling Murrell Sturgeon's 'estranged' husband.

Had the decree been finalised I'd have been enormously surprised had Sturgeon not drawn a clear line between her and Murrell by declaring it publically.