Peter Murrell embezzlement trial

[Sunnnyday]

Peter Murrell is in court in Edinburgh today. This is for the preliminary hearing which was postponed from before the election. It will be interesting to see how the criminal proceedings proceed.

www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/peter-murrell-arrives-at-court-ahead-of-hearing-on-embezzlement-charges/ar-AA23Ybuy?ocid=msedgntp&pc

Swinney really has shown his true colours, hasn’t he?

Somebody in the comments to the Times article recommends today's Wings post which has transcripts of the NEC meetings. They are worth a read.

It really is properly shocking, that the SNP were carrying on like this in private. Such poor governance.

To me the more shocking thing is that people keep voting SNP when they have shown themselves to be incapable of the most basic financial probity or corporate governance.

The ‘keeping the Scots stupid’ through the destruction of our education system is working well for them and the Greens.

They come across as a bunch of mindless bullies in the transcript on Wings, including Sturgeon. I do hope they are ashamed of themselves but I have the suspicion that they don't do shame.
I have despised Kirsten Oswald ever since her appearance on Question Time immediately after the start of the Ukraine invasion and every single answer she gave (with a smug wee grin on her face) was about "we in Scotland" because even when Russia invades a neighbouring country and people are dying the only thing that matters is Scotland.

I spoke to a friend yesterday who is well educated and very sensible. She informed me she has booked tickets to see NS at the Lit Festival. I was so surprised. Apparently she really admires NS and doesn't think she knew anything about her husbands activities. There are just no words.

The issue isn’t that he was her husband.

The issue is that she was effectively the equivalent of CEO or chairman perhaps. She was made aware of the - at the very least - risk or appearance of financial irregularities and audit issues over a number of years. A reasonable expectation of a person in that role would be to ask questions and look into it and to document that or outsource it to an independent person given her conflict of interest as married to someone with a finance role. She didn’t do that - quite the contrary - she didn’t just turn a blind eye but attempted to stop others looking into it or asking questions. If she’d been a company director in similar circumstances, she’d have been found in breach of duty.

A number of my friends are the same. It's all, 'she couldn't possibly be expected to know, they were high earners anyway' etc. No attention paid to the fact that governance within the SNP should have alerted her to any issues regardless of her personal relationship and whether she was taken in by his lies. As the judge or whoever said, it wasn't a sophisticated approach. At the end of the day they were caught out by people asking questions about the £600k raised for another referendum because they simply didn't have £600k sitting in the bank and everyone could see that. Even a busy party leader should have noticed that and asked where it was, never mind the rest of it. I can genuinely hardly believe a leader who had the audacity to suggest people should be careful when asking questions about the finances. Transparency is key when it comes to finances. You use multiple methods to prevent and limit the kind of embezzlement that Murrell committed but one of the most important tools is organisational culture. Sturgeon presided over a culture that clearly said, 'don't ask questions, don't raise concerns' even to their own audit committee. That is genuinely shocking and she and other key leaders are responsible for that. A better culture would have severely limited Murrell both in terms of the amounts he could take and the length of time he went undetected. How people think a leader who took that approach and attitude could be in any way good is beyond me.

Quite. Did she know (or have a good sense of what was going on) and sought to prevent an investigation, did dhe resent any interference , or did she believe that she was beyond being investigated? Nothing about this makes her look like she was open, transparent, or on top of things.

Surely, if she would have been convinced all was above board with the accounts she would have told her husband (and CEO of the party she was leader of) to let the actual treasurer see the accounts.

It's very hard not to conclude that she knew, as a minimum, that something was going on. I'd say that she very probably knew what her husband was doing, in the context of all the weird and extremely expensive stuff he was buying, as if he had vast amounts of money he had to burn through. So why didn't she stop it, even if she didn't want to expose him? Maybe he threatened her with something. He must have had a lot on her. And he appears to have suffered from some kind of addiction to embezzling.

This x200
I don’t really care what the embezzled money was spent on (amusing as it is)or whether as his wife she knew ( although hard to believe she didn’t)
It is in her position as party leader and signatory to the accounts that matters and she clearly failed there
People raised concerns,they were shouted down or ignored and the embezzlement went on.
How Swinney can get away with not having an enquiry I have no idea

I agree with you - and I used to be a member of the SNP.

I can’t fathom people still voting SNP.

The result in Arbroath and Broughty Ferry last week SNP again it beggars belief.

Pyla Lara Bird-Leakey is her real name but calls herself Lara Bird.
She is also on the executive committee of the "Balfour Project", an organisation that "educates on the UK's historic and current role in the Middle East" and has previously worked with the Britain Palestine Project.
In short, she's another political and Third Sector careerist with zero apparent interest in representing a Scottish constituency or dealing with day to day Scottish constituency problems. All her professional and academic links appear to be London-centric and she is, predictably, another British politician more interested in Gaza than Britain. The last person that Arbroath needs as a represntative.
It's also revealing that, on her university records, when writing for policy groups and for her work with the Britain Palestine Project and Balfour Project, she has been credited as Pyla Bird-Leakey but, when slumming among the plebs in Arbroath, she's mysteriously become Lara Bird.

Madness, I despair at who is being voted for!

Exactly. Some people are so brainwashed by the independence debate they can't see beyond it to how utterly corrupt and self serving the SNP are. Public services, education, women's rights , everything down the pan too.

An acquaintance of mine who is very much pro independence said that the other parties wouldn’t be any better. He might be right but he couldn’t understand why that makes independence even more of an anathema to me.

More in the Times today:
https://www.thetimes.com/article/f4a09c43-3c9f-4b7a-8c56-6b91ade2f353?shareToken=cfb8ea9bb349e2977596ead058e3e2fe&ver=article

That is such a stupid and lazy thing to say. What are the chances that a leader of one of the other parties in Scotland would steal a large percentage of party money? And that all the other parties are as negligent or complicit as the SNP, in allowing it to happen and covering it up? Does he think these people should be rewarded by being voted in again?

Another interesting feature of this whole shit show is clearly Murrell thought that the “ ring fenced donations “ would not be needed…so no real plans were ever laid for yet another referendum. How could anyone with any common sense or love for Scotland could vote for those rogues , liars and thieves is beyond me
im just glad that Allison and the other whistle blowers are having their say

Mone is a vile woman, very similar to Sturgeon in some ways, both bullies, smug and arrogant

As someone who did vote SNP in the (not recent) past, it always surprised me why there was not a plan for a 2nd Indyref when Sturgeon was at the height of her popularity.
Now I think I know why………

Will they ever be held to account for that "ring-fenced" money not actually being ring-fenced though? They seem to be getting away with it.
I wonder how they would respond if there was another referendum and Indy won it. Because that's when the real hard work starts, isn't it? One of the things that really struck me with Brexit is just how much hard and frustrating work was created for so many people who knew that whatever they did they were going to be making much less money. Preparing for independence, and then the struggles of independence itself. That is something I imagine many SNP politicians would very much like to avoid. They have it so easy on the current gravy train, on which failure is well paid and is always somebody else's fault.

It’d be good if more people would listen to Allison and Cynthia but unfortunately the people still in the SNP cult will avoid such stories and just call them unionists etc, which is a shame as you can tell they both believe in independence.

The cult-like behaviour really makes you despair for democracy. Democracy only works if people actually think for themselves. Independence has the same emotional pull for some people as "sovereignty" did during the Brexit referendum. They blocked their ears to everything else.

There was a plan but the UK Government wouldn’t authorise the vote.

UK Government Veto (Section 30 Order): For the 2014 Referendum Westminster temporarily granted Holyrood the legal power to hold a vote via a Section 30 Order. However, subsequent Prime Ministers—from Boris Johnson to Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer—refused to approve another transfer of power.
Supreme Court Ruling: The Scottish Government attempted to bypass Westminster by referring a draft referendum bill to the UK Supreme Court. In November 2022, the court ruled unanimously that the constitution is a reserved matter and the Scottish Parliament does not have the authority to legislate for a referendum without UK approval.