Wings Over Scotland

We’re getting so much correspondence from Police Scotland at the moment that we’re starting to feel like their guiltily-neglected penpal.

This one, though, is slightly more involved than their usual two-paragraph brushoff.

Don’t get too excited, though – it amounts to the same thing.

This is self-evident gibberish. Nobody was prosecuted, let alone convicted, over the misappropriation of the fundraiser money specifically (as opposed to the SNP’s general funds, which are what Peter Murrell was convicted of embezzling).

The only way that knowing the reasons they weren’t prosecuted could possibly “prejudice the prevention or detection of crime and apprehension or prosecution of offenders” is if those reasons revealed either some sort of loophole in the law, or some inappropriate interference with its natural processes on the part of the Crown Office, Police Scotland or both.

Neither is a legitimate reason to refuse disclosure. Any loophole should be addressed by Parliament, and inappropriate interference is itself a criminal matter. (Albeit one you could only report to… Police Scotland and the Crown Office.)

The response then attempts to add further excuses.

This is equally obvious nonsense. Everyone already knows who the leadership of the SNP was during Operation Branchform, and who we were asking about in the FOI request – Nicola Sturgeon, her chief executive Peter Murrell and her treasurer Colin Beattie. There is no need to conceal their identity when everyone already knows it.

This is extraordinary. It says, entirely correctly, that:

“It is in the public interest that an understanding exists as to the processes involved in police investigations and in their relative success. This is particularly true in investigations, therefore, accountability and transparency relating to the actions of Police Scotland and its officers would favour disclosure of the information.”

But then it point-blank refuses to actually disclose the information because… well, for no actual valid reason that we can detect. As far as we can make out from those last three paragraphs, Police Scotland is refusing to disclose the information because Police Scotland holds the information and it might reflect poorly on the actions of Police Scotland.

Honestly, folks, we’ve read those three sentences over and over again trying to find any other sort of coherent meaning in them and it simply isn’t there. The whole passage can be accurately summarised as:

“We should give you this information, but it’s important that we don’t because it might make us look bad therefore we’ve decided you have no right to know, even though that’s pretty much the entire point of Freedom Of Information law existing in the first place.”

And it keeps getting madder.

The question asked was about the very specific distinction between the original enquiry into misappropriated fundraiser money used for SNP purposes other than a second referendum campaign, and the subsequent enquiry into general SNP funds embezzled by Peter Murrell for his personal benefit.

We know when that change happened, because the police themselves briefed journalists about it back in June after Murrell’s sentencing.

It was some time between October 2022 and “early spring 2023”. So why are we now being fed some rancid cobblers about it being March 2025? And why did the police submit an “advice and guidance” report to the Crown Office in August 2024 asking them what to do about the original complaint, separate to the embezzlement charge, when by their own assertion they’d already concluded 18 months earlier that there wasn’t enough evidence to charge anyone on the former?

What did that report say, exactly? “We haven’t got enough evidence to charge anyone, but should we charge them anyway and waste a bucketload of public money just for laughs?”?

What evidence was missing? There is no conceivable credible dispute that the money was misappropriated, as assessed by Scotland’s most respected lawyer, the Dean of the Faculty Of Advocates.

The Dean’s analysis was crystal clear:

Nor is there any possible doubt as to who could have been responsible, both practically and in law: one or more of the three party officers who signed off on the SNP’s accounts.

The money was visibly misappropriated, and we have a very small list of suspects. The job of the police and the courts is only to establish which of them it was.

There are no defensible grounds for simply not even bothering to try, and then telling people there wasn’t enough evidence. The evidence is abundant and unquestionable, and as we saw yesterday, Police Scotland have flat-out refused to identify a single item in the Dean’s analysis with which they disagree.

“La la la we’re not telling you, please go away now” is not acceptable.

We will of course be raising the matter with the Information Commissioner immediately, and we have grounds to believe he may look on it sympathetically.

The SNP’s response, of course, has been to try to pre-emptively cripple the office of the Information Commissioner and render it completely impotent in terms of any information which could be damaging to the government.

While also starving it of funds.

The Scottish Government REALLY doesn’t like the Information Commissioner.

And that’s because along with the Auditor General, he’s just about the last public official anywhere in Scotland who is (a) bothered about doing his job properly, and (b) competent enough to actually manage it.

Our appeal to OSIC will take place alongside our application for a judicial review of Police Scotland’s decision not to bring charges in respect of the original Operation Branchform complaint, and such is the time it takes to get anything done in Scotland nowadays, it’s anyone’s guess as to which will make progress first.

But readers, we’ve got nothing else to do. This is our job, and just like David Hamilton, we intend to stick at it.