Peter Murrell embezzlement - Part 2

[Sunnnyday]

Feel free to post anything about corruption in Scottish politics, and related issues.

There's plenty of corruption at the top of the SNP. Remember this one from 2023, by an SNP minister?
Michael Matheson: Furore over £11,000 iPad bill 'completely blown out of all proportion', says shamed MSP | UK News | Sky News
Matheson said that the reaction to his basically trying to steal £11,000 from the taxpayer was overblown for political reasons. After doing everything he could to pretend that the bill had been incurred on constituency work, so that he could get the taxpayer to pay for his family's personal use of the iPad while abroad on holiday. His sons had been watching the football.
Here's an earlier stage of the scandal, when he was only asked to repay £3,000, out of his expenses budget (so he wouldn't have paid anything out of his own money), with the Scottish Parliament paying the extra £8,000:
Minister Michael Matheson racks up £11k roaming fee on parliament iPad - BBC News

The Scottish Parliament's Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee, according to Wikipedia: "reported on 23 May 2024, recommending a 27-day ban from the Scottish Parliament, as well as Matheson's being withheld his salary as an MSP for 54 days. This was described as the toughest sanction ever recommended for an MSP. The First Minister, John Swinney, declared that he would not support the committee's recommended sanction, describing Matheson as a "friend and colleague" who had "made mistakes", and casting doubt on the integrity of the committee's process: describing the process as "prejudiced"". The SNP as a party abstained on the vote to sanction Matheson, as recommended by the committee.

Matheson, having resigned from his ministerial job, continued as an MSP until this year's Holyrood elections. He submitted an application to stand again, but it seems that his constituency wasn't very happy with the idea.

But please don't worry about him too much. He is apparently in gainful work connected to his political roles.

Interesting. And agree with every word.
'Cosy slippers' Pete loves his gigs round the studios of Westminster. Keeps the gravy flowing.

What a shower indeed

So the SNP are now saying that they will repay donations to their Indy Referendum fund if individual donors write in to ask for refunds. Apparently the total amount donated was £667,000. I don't know where they'll get the money from, as until now the SNP have been saying that they can't afford to repay the donations, due to the embezzlement by Peter Murrell.

But the legal advice given to Wings over Scotland is that if a civil claim were brought against the SNP, it would almost certainly win and the award to donors (who took part in the claim) wouldn't be just to have their donations returned, it would include interest which, by this stage, would be in about the same amount as the original donations. And on top of that donors could claim compensation for how they've been treated.

So if everyone claimed, that would be £1,334,000, plus whatever the compensation came to.

Here's a handy Noddy guide to the current scandal. It's from the Daily Mail but looks accurate:

SNP U-turn over refunding cash to donors after Murrell's £400K fraud | Daily Mail Online

I saw this post on another online discussion and thought it was interesting:

The Peter Murrell snp saga is about so much more than Mont Blanc pens and coffee machines.
In October 2020 rumours start that the SNP are in financial difficulty after a blogger reveals that the SNP have just over £96,000 in the bank despite raising £666.953, ringfenced for Indy2.
In March 2021 the top three SNP officials of the SNP Finance & Audit committee, Frank Ross, Allison Graham and Cynthia Guthrie resigned because they were "denied sight of the accounts."
After these resignations and because of growing rumours re: the SNP finances, Sturgeon addresses the SNP Executive via a video call in March 2021, stating that "the party has never been in a stronger financial position than it is right now," and warns members to be careful what they say about the party's finances.
At this time, Sturgeon, Murrell and Colin Beattie take on the duties of the Finance & Audit committee, overseeing and the signing off of the accounts.
However, in May 2021, Douglas Chapman, SNP National Treasurer also resigns, stating he couldn't do his job due to a lack of financial information.
You'd think after the resignation of the SNP Finance & Audit committee and the National Treasurer Douglas Chapman, both of whom cited the lack of financial information as the reason for their resignations that Sturgeon as Chief Executive and as she had sight of the accounts would think that there's a problem with SNP finances and that there was over £600,000 missing from the accounts. However, she didn't.
Alarm bells also were silent when in June 2021 when due to a cash flow problem, Murrell loaned the SNP £107,620. This is money Murrell stole from the SNP, loaned back to them and then was paid back to him with interest, you couldn't make it up.
It's totally unbelievable that after the accountancy firm, Johnston Carmichael resigned in September 2022 as SNP auditors, that Sturgeon still didn't think there was issues with the SNP accounts. This firm had been the SNP accountants for over 10 years and was now refusing to 'touch their books.'
After this resignation the SNP had problems finding an accountancy firm in Scotland to audit their accounts, no one would touch them. Eventually in May 2023, an English firm, AMS Accountants Group became auditors to the SNP.
AMS did submit the SNP accounts with a qualification that there was missing paperwork relating to cash and cheque donations. The SNP said this was just down to "administrative processes" and there was "no suggestion of misappropriation of funds".
When I use the term "the SNP," I mean Sturgeon as Chief Executive. She mirco-managed the party and would have been well aware of financial irregularities in the accounts as far back as 2020, if not before, but particularly after the resignations of the Finance & Audit committee, the National Treasurer and Johnston Carmichael Auditors.
As for Sturgeon, she is now claiming she knew nothing about the irregularities with the party's finances.
She never knew about the campervan sitting on her MiL drive, which beggars the question, why didn't she park on the drive while visiting her MiL on various occasions?
Sturgeon was very quick to publicly claim that she had "fully cooperated" with police officers of Operation Branchform. Only later it was revealed that during eight hours of questioning by the police, Sturgeon answered every question with "no comment."
Sturgeon did later submit a statement to the Branchform inquiry, however she was never questioned on the contents of that statement.
Sturgeon is now claiming she is being vilified because of her husbands crimes and her gender. She also has the audacity to suggest that she is a victim of this deceit.
It was Sturgeon as Chief Executive who had access to the accounts. It was Sturgeon who shut down people's concerns regarding the party's finances. It was Sturgeon who fostered an environment of secrecy and mismanagement.
Sturgeon is guilty of a gross dereliction of duty and this is what she is being "vilified" for.
There needs to be a public inquiry into questions the police couldn't ask. Questions of how was this allowed to happen, the true extent of the theft, (Murrell admitted to stealing £400,000 although over £600,000 was missing, £200,000 is still unaccounted for) and how to prevent it happening again?
If Swinney doesn't allow a public inquiry this could be construed as a cover-up and a continuation of the secrecy and mismanagement of Sturgeon.

Nicola Sturgeon wasn’t Chief Executive - Peter Murrell was.

She was Party Leader.

Lots of the issues raised are still relevant in her role as Party Leader, but she wasn’t the Chief Exec - he was.

That's right. Am I right in thinking that she was senior to Murrell within the SNP?

Tbh I don’t know exactly how the SNP work, but in Labour and the Conservatives the party leader isn’t senior to the chief exec/general secretary.

The party leader is in charge of the political party side of things, but the chief exec is in charge of the admin/functioning/finance side.

At most they’d be equal, but in Labour, as an example, their General Secretary is the most senior employee overall.

I think that’s something that is quite key in the Murrell case. He was (as far as I can tell from reading through stuff) the most senior employee of the SNP for many many years. His stance on things like expenses likely shaped the entire party stance on it, and it sounds like there was nobody else monitoring his expenses, hence nobody raising any questions until the journalist did.

There is another article about potential link between SNP and Yes Scotland finance in the Times:
https://www.thetimes.com/article/6abade5e-79bc-493b-b26a-ebb66b21376e?shareToken=4efac4e2244b77cc18e87885fe861a50&ver=article

Where would they get the money? I assume they are just hoping most supporters wont apply for it back, which is quite likely.

Could they potentially be insured? Given it was theft/a crime.

I’ve no idea if that’s a thing for political parties. A school I once worked in had a staff member steal a load of money from school funds and the school got it back through insurance so I wonder if there’s anything like that for the SNP.

Otherwise they’ll surely mostly be relying on what they can claw back after the proceeds of crime hearing?

My understanding is that the money taken for the 'ringfenced' independence fund is/was separate from the money that Murrell embezzled, or at least that was the SNP's assertion. Sort of. At some points they said the former sum was 'woven through' the accounts.

No idea if an insurance company would pay out money that was raised on that basis and spent on another, even if it was subsequently stolen.

It's all very very murky. It needs forensic accountants to go through it all, ones who are not politically connected in any way to any of the parties involved.

Listening to what Nicola Sturgeon is saying in this interview, I THINK she's saying that the "ring-fenced" £600,000 was just put in the SNP bank account with all their other money. So it's not clear in what way, if any, it was "ring-fenced". How would others interpret this?
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David Davis using parliamentary privilege to discuss NS. But can’t find what he actually said.

Copy and paste from the National (which makes me feel a bit grubby)

"Tory MP David Davis, a friend of the late former SNP leader Alex Salmond, claimed in the House of Commons that Sturgeon and her allies had orchestrated sexual offence allegations against Salmond in a bid to “hide their own crimes”."

and

"Davis further alleged that Sturgeon had known about and enabled her estranged husband Peter Murrell’s embezzlement from the SNP."

And

In a statement issued through her lawyer, Sturgeon responded: “This member of the ‘Old Boys Club’ has been spreading conspiracy theories on behalf of the late Alex Salmond since 2021 – and now he is telling more lies about me."

Found it. Nothing much new but connecting it to AS. Plus asking for an enquiry. Her response is swift and angry which suggests she is pretty riled up. Guilt?

Rude as well about David Davis - she might not agree with his politics but he has been a MP since 1987, former Conservative party chairman, Brexit minister, chair of the Public Accounts Committee for 4 years so kinda knows what he's talking about.

Her response is embarrassing and comes over very poorly. She just loves to portray herself as some kind of victim and then the mask slips and the inner bully is on full show.

I’ve just read Joanna Cherrys memoir. She was my constituency MP and thought she did a a very good job (despite the fact I never voted for her given position on independence). Her books reads as a never-ending story of incompetence, ego, sleaze snd cover up within the SNP. It made me feel quite sick.

Does her book explain why she didn’t say anything about the financial issues until after Stuart Campbell raised it?

If it does I may buy it. I liked her, but I’m wary of all the big names that were part of the SNP who seemed to know absolutely nothing before discovering issues and speaking about them right after he spoke up in Wings about his suspicions of financial irregularities.

There was the story a while back that she herself had ended up having her SNP credit card suspended a few times for not paying back things on time, which sounds very much like it was common to use SNP cards for private use and I’m curious about how folks explain/excuse that.

(As in the folks who have the cards - I’ve never known anyone whose work card was allowed to just casually be used personally)

Not that I recall…there is a definite hint of “if only they would have listened to me it would all be fine” and lots of love for Alec Salmond…a man I had no time or respect for, but generally I found her approach and arguments very sensible,

Nicola Sturgeon accused of ‘lying’ and ‘enabling’ Murrell’s crimes

https://www.thetimes.com/article/fcccb613-7525-4aa0-8adc-979c118de21a?shareToken=1e1f0e1747c90d1a05e6e0d4eb8d32a6

'Sturgeon was part of the cover-up, using her position to suppress justice. She behaved dishonourably and dishonestly. But her most evil act was stitching up Alex Salmond to hide the truth.”'

Gosh imagine saying that crikey I'm shocked is anyone else shocked

'Paul McManus, 59, a wealthy Scottish businessman and drummer with the rock band Gun, has since taken up the case and claimed this month that he and his legal team had amassed evidence that he described as “utterly devastating”.'

😶

Which is kinda interesting given Murrell was thieving under Salmond (and had in fact known AS even longer than he’d known NS).

I wonder if anyone will ever actually come out and hold their hands up that they were all incredibly irresponsible with regard to money and funds, as it definitely sounds like it.