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

[Imdunfer]

Follow on from previous thread.

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

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

“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…

Oopsie.

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?

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

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.

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.

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!!

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?

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.