So this snuck out quietly at the bottom of page 2 of today’s Daily Record.
And like, we suspect, most of Scotland, our response was “WHAT?”
Peter Murrell has been very well paid for most of the last 20 years – somewhere in the ballpark of £100,000 a year – and there’s very little evidence of him spending any of it on anything. He shared a modest house in Uddingston, had a couple of pricey but not wildly extravagant cars, no public social life and he’s too fat to have a heroin habit.
Quite recently he had so much spare cash floating around that he was able to loan the SNP £108,000 of it (and of course he stands accused of embezzling more from the party). So why in the world are WE suddenly all on the hook for paying what would undoubtedly be a fortune – embezzlement cases are notoriously complex and usually drawn-out affairs – for his legal costs? Where’s it all gone, Peter?
The rules for legal aid in Scotland – set, delightfully, by the Scottish Parliament – are very vague, but we know they’re relatively generous if it’s for a criminal matter (it’s a lot harder to get any help for a civil case). Your main residence doesn’t count as an asset, for example, so whether he’s staying at the Uddingston house, his villa in Portugal or somewhere else, those will be off the books.
His £95,000 Jaguar was part of the police investigation into his alleged embezzlement, so presumably that doesn’t get counted as an asset either, and of course the iconic campervan belongs to the SNP, not Murrell personally. And as he and Sturgeon are now conveniently separated – although they weren’t at the time of the alleged crimes – none of her considerable personal riches – including a £300,000 book advance – can be taken into account either.
Also conveniently, Sturgeon was very careful to emphasise in 2023, before Murrell had been arrested or their separation announced, that the loan money belonged solely to Murrell, though the couple have always refused to either confirm or deny whether they had a joint bank account.
A third convenience (in terms of getting legal aid, at least) is that because the crime is one of embezzlement, ie a financial one, the Lord Advocate, who answers to the First Minister and still attends SNP cabinet meetings, has frozen Murrell’s property assets under the Proceeds Of Crime Act 2002.
(The piece refers very specifically to an inhibition being ordered on his property, and primarily his houses – there’s no mention in it of his cash assets also being frozen, although that is possible under POCA2022.)
And as far as we know Murrell has been unemployed since standing down as SNP CEO in 2023, so his current income is presumably minimal. But with legal aid in a huge financial crisis in Scotland, it still defies belief that a lavishly-remunerated hermit like Murrell doesn’t have enough salted away in the bank to pay for his own lawyers like Alex Salmond had to when Murrell tried to stitch him up over false allegations.
(What perhaps IS believable is that despite professing that “we still care deeply for each other, and always will”, Sturgeon’s profound and undying fondness for her loyal still-husband doesn’t extend to lending him a few quid for his defence if she can get the people of Scotland to pick up the tab for it instead.)
We know for sure, for example, that the SNP still owes him £60,000 of that 2021 loan (exclusively revealed by Wings, just like most of the entire affair was). As of today, the Electoral Commission’s register entry for the loan shows that less than £48,000 of it has been paid back.
But the fact is that Peter Murrell has trousered somewhere close to £2 million over his time as SNP CEO, and nobody knows where it’s gone. Everything about the matter, frankly, stinks to the heavens. But Scotland is controlled by such a comically corrupt and crooked cabal of cosy cronyism, with everyone covering everyone else’s back, that the chances of any of it ever seeing the light of day are microscopic.
Indeed, it remains very distinctly possible that Murrell will ultimately cop a plea deal, accepting a reduced sentence in exchange for avoiding a trial, so that neither the public nor the SNP members whose party was allegedly defrauded will ever get to hear what actually happened.
(Though interestingly, if Murrell is so broke that he needs the taxpayer to pay for his defence, that would seem to preclude any possibility of him getting away with a fine.)
If and when that happens, the whereabouts of the “ring-fenced” £600,000 for a second indyref campaign that vanished into the ether will never be explained, we’ll never know what the infamous campervan was really for or who authorised its purchase, or why a control-freak First Minister who lived in the same house as her party-CEO husband, and who angrily ordered her quivering minions not to question the party finances, never suspected a thing about what he was up to.
Nothing will be resolved, and the rotten stench will linger over the SNP and Scotland forever. It’ll be, to all intents and purposes, as though none of it ever happened at all.
