{"id":16743,"date":"2024-12-30T13:38:27","date_gmt":"2024-12-30T13:38:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/?p=16743"},"modified":"2025-01-12T11:31:13","modified_gmt":"2025-01-12T11:31:13","slug":"the-gift-nobody-wants-to-open","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/2024\/12\/the-gift-nobody-wants-to-open\/","title":{"rendered":"The gift nobody wants to open"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
The investigation into the SNP’s finances is making incredibly slow progress.<\/strong><\/h5>\n

Here is a recap<\/strong><\/p>\n

The inquiry began in 2021<\/strong> with a complaint that \u00a3600,000 contributed by supporters to a campaign fund for a new independence referendum was actually spent on fighting the Holyrood election of that year.<\/p>\n

In April 2023<\/strong>, the investigation team visited – or perhaps \u2018swooped\u2019<\/a> or \u2018raided\u2019 the suburban home which the party\u2019s former Chief Executive Peter Murrell shares with his wife Nicola Sturgeon. You probably remember this – the large police vans, the forensic tent that was erected in the garden and police officers photographed carrying tools and teabags and looking into bins. Newspapers quoted neighbours saying it was like the scene of a murder inquiry or a TV cop show.<\/p>\n

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Also in April 2023, <\/strong>Murrell was arrested and questioned by police, as was the party\u2019s treasurer Colin Beattie. A camper van that was parked in front of Peter Murrell\u2019s mother\u2019s home was impounded.<\/p>\n

In June 2023<\/strong>, Nicola Sturgeon was briefly arrested and questioned for a a few hours.<\/p>\n

Eventually, in April 2024<\/strong>, Police Scotland charged Murrell with embezzlement.<\/p>\n

The prolonged investigation and the embezzlement charge certainly cast a shadow over the Scottish National Party and negatively affected its General Election performance.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The raids, the investigation and the pending court appearances were made much of by the SNP\u2019s opponents in the run-up to the UK general election on July 4<\/strong>. Who can blame the Question Time guests and the doorstep canvassers who made sly allusions to it – it was a gift to them.<\/p>\n

After the vote Tommy Shepherd, who lost his Edinburgh Easdt seat, listed it among other reasons for the slump in support:<\/p>\n

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“And then there was the elephant in the room. Operation Branchform. Never mentioned, always there. Hard to fight an election with your former leaders awaiting charges, especially when many of the public perceive little distance between now and then.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

When a charge is laid by Police Scotland, it up to the prosecution service to decide whether there is a strong enough case to go to court. There has to be reasonable chance of a guilty verdict. Otherwise, it would be a waste of public resources.<\/p>\n

In September 2024,<\/strong> it was reported the Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain has recused herself from making any decisions in the case. Due to the opacity of Scottish justice, we have now have no idea who will make this decision. Perhaps nobody does. I picture Santa\u2019s elfs moving the bulky files (because they are probably on paper and written with quill pens) from one desk to another.<\/p>\n

In October 2024<\/strong>, in response to a freedom of information request from LBC\u2019s Scotland correspondent Alan Zycinski, Police Scotland revealed that the cost of the inquiry, which apparently employs 11 officers, had reached \u00a31.8 million – three times the original queried donations.<\/p>\n

I checked last week with the COFPS and they said they had nothing to add to their previous statement, that they have received a prosecution case on a 59 year old man and that<\/p>\n

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\u201cConnected investigations of two other individuals, a man aged 72 and a 53-year-old woman, remain ongoing.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It is hard to credit that Scotland\u2019s creaking justice system has spent in the region of \u00a32 million over almost four years investigating an organisation with a turnover of about \u00a34 million.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The SNP is not a big or complex institution. The auditing bill for an organisation of that size would be a few thousand a year. For comparison, as I pointed in a piece I wrote in March<\/a>, the Old Course Hotel and Golf Resort in St Andrews employs more than 200 people and has a revenue of about \u00a318 million.<\/p>\n

Binance investivatigation concluded in two years<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here is another comparison – the crypto firm Binance crashed in mid-2023, though queries about it had started a year or so earlier. It had a global workforce of 1,000 and an annual revenue of $16 billion in that year – so its revenue was 4,000 times as large as the SNP and its workforce was spread across many countries instead of just one. Yet its founder Sam Bankman-Fried was brought to trial for embezzlement and sentenced in March.<\/p>\n

An apologist for Scotland\u2019s justice community was on TV recently bleating that it is quite usual for an investigation like this to take a long time. That is not true.<\/strong><\/p>\n

There is no case that I can find where an organisation of this size faced an investigation over this length of time.<\/p>\n

The investigation has taken an inordinate amount of time and consumed an unjustifiable amount of resources.<\/p>\n

Five police squad vans of the kind that are used for big demonstrations or football matches to search the house?<\/p>\n

Peter Murrell is no Pablo Escobar.<\/p>\n

Why is it taking so long to decide whether to take the case to court?<\/h2>\n

At this moment there is very little comment about the case and what there is is guarded. The Contempt of Court rules in Scotland are draconian .<\/p>\n

The COFPS sent me this little reminder along with their comment:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cAnyone publishing items about active cases is advised to exercise caution as material must not be commentary or analysis of evidence, witnesses or accused. Contempt of Court carries penalties of up to two years in prison and\/or an unlimited fine.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Few media outlets today are in a position to take risks of any kind so there is almost nobody writing about this. But concern is growing, even among the SNP\u2019s political opponents.<\/p>\n

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Scottish Labour Deputy Leader Jackie Baillie told the Daily Record last week: “Whilst the police must have the resources they need to conduct an independent investigation, it is important that the Crown Office do not delay further and they must determine if further charges are warranted.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This must be concluded well before the next Holyrood election<\/strong><\/p>\n

The people of Scotland have a right to expect that a decision will be made soon. We are about to go into 2025 – there will be a Holyrood election in May 2026. If the case is strong enough to go to court it would be better that it is concluded by then.<\/p>\n

It seems likely that the case against Beattie and Sturgeon rests on the legal obligations that people take on when they sign off on any organisation\u2019s accounts. Whether or not you know about any irregularities you can be held legally accountable for any that arise. So these stand or fall on the strength of the case against Murrell.<\/p>\n

If the case against Murrell is strong enough to go to court then that\u2019s easy. If the case against Murrell is thin, that is much harder. If they drop it they will be accused of being in the pocket of the Scottish Government. But it they were, for example, to take allegations that political donations were spent on an election rather than a referendum to court, they would look like a bunch of incompetent clowns.<\/p>\n

There is no easy choice if the case is weak. However, we pay these guys to take difficult decisions and further delay is just going to add to the cost.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s hope that when they get back to work after the holidays someone in Chambers Street has the smeddum<\/a> to open the parcel and deal with it one way or the other. This is getting embarrassing.<\/p>\n

First published on the author’s A Letter from Scotland Substack<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Spare a thought this Christmas\/New Year for the person at the Fiscals\u2019 office on whose desk the file marked \u2018Operation Branch Form\u2019, the investigation into the SNP\u2019s finances, is resting. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":3465,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[125],"tags":[36,130,430],"class_list":["post-16743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-scottish-government","tag-snp","tag-sturgeon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16743\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}