Wings Over Scotland

This really isn’t going to go away.

No matter how hard Nicola Sturgeon gets Aamer Anwar to scream about it.

Because every time anyone says anything in an attempt to shut down questions, it just raises a whole bundle more questions. The reported comments by Police Scotland today are a remarkable case in point. What we’re now being told happened is this:

– Police think they have sufficient evidence to arrest and question Sturgeon

– Sturgeon refuses to answer questions

– Police seek advice from Crown Office

– Crown Office, whose head is directly answerable to the First Minister, tells the police to back off, despite Sturgeon not having answered the police’s questions.

If you’ve got enough evidence to arrest someone on suspicion of a serious crime and they refuse to account for their actions, the only way to establish the facts is at a trial. You can ignore a TV or newspaper interviewer’s questions without consequence, but not a prosecuting counsel’s. The judge will notice.

Remember, two very distinct (though related) crimes have taken place here, and we’ve never been told which one Sturgeon was held on suspicion of. The Police Scotland statement on her arrest said only that she’d been apprehended “as a suspect in connection with the ongoing investigation into the funding and finances of the Scottish National Party”, a generic description that doesn’t tell us whether it was to do with the fraudulent fundraisers conducted BY the party or suspected involvement with Murrell’s embezzlement FROM the party.

We have no evidence suggesting that Sturgeon was implicated in the latter. But the former is absolutely black with her sticky fingerprints, plainly visible to anyone.

She was the leader of the party. She personally, on video, solicited the donations for “ringfenced” funds. She insisted the money hadn’t then been spent on anything else when anyone with functioning eyes could see that it had – something the party has now belatedly admitted. She threatened and pushed out anyone who asked questions about it. She said, personally, on video, that the money wasn’t missing at all.

So there are two possibilities:

(1) The police asked her about the fraudulent fundraisers.

(2) They only asked her about the embezzlement and she’s NEVER in fact been questioned about the fundraisers.

The second option is certainly plausible, even probable, as Sturgeon wasn’t arrested until more than two years into Operation Branchform, the month before the police officially confirmed that the investigation had “moved beyond” the original complaints.

That in itself is remarkable. When a party has been accused of misappropriating a very large amount of solicited funds, and there is indisputable proof that the funds have indeed been spent on something other than the purpose they were ostensibly solicited for (requiring only 30 seconds’ work to establish, by looking at their accounts), it would be logical to interview the leader, chief executive and treasurer straight away to see if there was a simple explanation.

So what took two years? Nobody had complained about “an individual” or suggested that the party’s money had been stolen from it to buy someone frou-frou knick-knacks. They were suggesting it had been spent on the things the party’s accounts said it had been spent on – election campaigning, debt repayment, that sort of thing. It wasn’t, in fact, “complex” at all. It was a single simple question:

“You took money from people for X, X has not happened and yet the money has gone and you appear to have spent it on Y and Z instead. Do you have a lawful explanation for that apparently straightforward fraud?”

That doesn’t take two years to answer. The whole thing could have been done and dusted inside a week tops. But what seems to have happened is that Police Scotland spent the two years doing mumble mumble something mumble and then interviewed the three people responsible for the SNP’s finances about something else entirely that they’d stumbled across while nosing around, eventually charging one of them with a totally different crime to the one that had been initially reported.

So we don’t even know WHAT the Crown Office told the police to back off about, let alone WHY. Whenever anyone asks for any pertinent information, they get fobbed off with vague non-answers that say nothing, not even what actual question it is that they’re not answering.

It’s worth spelling it out in stark, crystal-clear terms: we have no evidence of any kind that anyone from the SNP has ever even been questioned by the police about the missing fundraiser money, and indeed the circumstantial evidence suggests that they have not.

(Not least because if they had been, how could nobody have been charged for it? It’s an open-and-shut case. The party’s current leader admits the money’s been spent when they absolutely swore to donors it wouldn’t be. That means it can only be one of two things – fraud against the donors if they always INTENDED to spend it on other stuff, or embezzlement against the donors if they raised it with honest intentions but then spent it on something else. There is no valid explanation that isn’t criminal, there’s only a question of which specific crime it is.)

Notably, the trial narrative agreed by the prosecution and defence for Murrell at no point even mentions the fundraisers or the “ringfenced” fund. It does, however, note that Murrell’s embezzlement was an incidental discovery while something else (not specifically named in the document) was being investigated.

The complaint about that “something else” appears in all official senses to have somehow completely evaporated into the ether, and everyone’s been distracted with a whole other circus in which a burglar got mugged on the way home from a burglary and everyone’s decided that they don’t give a toss about the people who got burgled and they’ve just jailed the mugger, while the burglar gets to gallivant around with the stuff they pinched, crying about how sad they were to be mugged.

It’s not good enough, folks. It’s not good enough by a long chalk.