Homework exercise
We accidentally de-retired for a week last week because the outrage of Craig Murray’s imprisonment couldn’t be allowed to go unremarked. But we’re shutting back down again now, so here’s a fun challenge to occupy yourselves with in what’s left of what’s passed for the summer.
Because the feat described in that picture isn’t an easy one.
We have a very good idea of what the SNP’s offices in Edinburgh look like, because as luck would have it two floors of the same building are currently up for rent.
(Weirdly, the party isn’t listed as one of the building’s “Major tenants”.)
The SNP occupy the third floor of Gordon Lamb House, which is basically identical to the first-floor space that’s currently available.
It’s well-sized for the party, which has 20 full-time-equivalent staff according to its last published accounts, including CEO Peter Murrell and COO Sue Ruddick.
So here’s your challenge:
We want you to find a way to spend £386,000 on furnishing that room, and also £230,000 on computer equipment for 20 people.
This is a real competition – we’ll give a Wings genuine gold* coin (normally exclusive to people donating over £500, so extremely rare) to the winner in each category.
*plated
So no cheating by making all the windows out of diamonds or anything. We’re looking for legitimate plausible breakdowns of how you could spend that much money. You can be very extravagant, but you can’t be absurd.
RULES
– The SNP can claim back VAT, so use VAT-exclusive prices.
– You can’t make structural alterations to the building. It’s a rented office so the most you can do is put some non-load-bearing dividing walls in.
– The toilet facilities are external, so nothing to spend there.
– We’ll pretend for the sake of the competition that there was no existing furniture and no existing computer equipment before last year and you’re starting from zero.
– Assume no bulk-buying discounts.
We’ll get you started with some tips:
Obviously you’ll need a superwoke sitting/standing ergonomic desk like all the modern hipster tossers. This one comes in at a bargain £1,843.
And you can’t expect your fragile diversity and inclusion warriors to sit on the same sort of plebby normal £180 office chair from IKEA as Nazi oiks like Wings, no matter how comfortable and durable it is (the Markus is far and away the most popular choice of all my videogame-journalist pals, trivia fans). You’re in the New SNP, for God’s sake! You’ll need a Herman Miller. Their classic Aeron is a snip at £927 (excl. VAT).
So that’s £2,770 for every workstation, which comes to £55,400 if you can manage to squeeze 20 of them into the space for every single party employee to use at the same time. Watch your budget, though – you’ve only got £330,000 left over to spend on some cupboards, sofas for reception and a boardroom table and chairs.
The computing equipment funds should be a bit easier to dispose of. Let’s start by getting everyone a top-spec iPad Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max, with all the trimmings – keyboard and pencil addons and insurance coverage, plus of course AirPods so you can enjoy maximum privacy when discussing how best to pressurise Police Scotland into prosecuting your former leader.
That’s £3,885.50 per head excluding VAT, or £77,710 total for all 20 staff. But obviously we’ll need desktop PCs with nice monitors too. And this sort of pauper trash won’t do for Nicola’s Twitler Youth stormtroopers:
So we could go the Apple route again:
But why cheap out? The punters are paying! Let’s really go for it:
At just £3,562 ex VAT each, you can kit out the whole team with the latest fully-maxed Surface Studio 2s from Microsoft for only £71,233, taking your total to £148,943. You’ve still got nearly £80K spare, though, so to ensure COVID-19 social distancing compliance you probably better throw in some nice laptops for everyone too:
The top-of-the-range Surface 4 isn’t actually available yet, but hey, what’s your rush? There’s no indyref coming for at least a couple of years [hollow laugh], so you’ll have them in plenty of time. At £2,066 ex VAT a pop that rings up another £41,317.
After buying every single SNP employee all that stuff – every element of which is far superior to anything used to produce Wings, btw – you still need to spend another £40,000 to reach the SNP’s outlay on computer equipment in 2020. So you’re going to have to be creative, readers. (And the lord alone knows how you’re going to rack up that furniture bill.) Best of luck.
Shall we say 31 August closing date for entries? See you then.
Desk lamps (serious readers £150 each), some paintings for the walls, and how about some posh rugs? That should do it.
Is it within the rules if I outsource/subcontract the two major areas, ( IT and office provisioning and management) as recurring expenses to ‘independent’ businesses where me and my cronies can cream of ‘reasonable’ profits?
😉
Yup, follow the money.
So that’s what they interpreted as ring fenced.
Not Conran furniture. Ran con furniture more like.
Much and all as I’d love one of the gold coins, I can’t be arsed spending time working this out. I’d only get in a state and raise my blood pressure which has already far too much to cope with. Good luck to all who enter here!
Dyson air things, that’s another £13000.
How much would it cost to make a clandestine panic room for one man and his magpies?
“Dyson air things, that’s another £13000.”
For a space that size I don’t think you could justify more than half a dozen of these:
link to currys.co.uk
Which is only £3,000.
Even one per person is only £10K.
When this story broke. A retired forensic accountant commented that in his experience, office costs ,computers, furnishings and decorations was a favourite of fraudsters to disguise where the money actually went.
Hard Times ahead for wee sturgeon.
100 Persian rugs at £6500 per rug to cover that floor space…
link to naintrading.co.uk
A second hand Picasso for the board room? That should more than do it!!
“100 Persian rugs at £6500 per rug to cover that floor space”
Rugs? Health and Safety would have palpitations! So many slip hazards!
Massaging chairs all round including the head massage fitments to massage all those egos.
Bookcases full of books that Nicola can pick up to stick in her bookcase to say she’s read.
Multiple games of twister for when the former French ambassador or lord advocate are visiting.
“Massaging chairs all round including the head massage fitments to massage all those egos.”
Even a genuine La-Z-Boy comes in at less than the Herman Miller.
link to relaxsofasandbeds.co.uk
You may be missing one big point. At no point does it say the fixtures and fittings are exclusively for that office, does it? I’m pretty sure I could find a way to spend a large amount on some extremely small pieces of office furnishings, like pens, wall sockets etc for other people’s offices, if I wanted to find out what they were up not. Not that I’m in any way suggesting the SNP would do such a thing – I’m quite sure they’d never dream of it. Just pointing out fixtures and fittings can have purposes above and beyond their apparent use. And the fitting and monitoring might be quite expensive in that case. So if I wanted to find a way to rack up that amount, that’s what I’d do: look outside my own office to who else’s it might be useful for me to “furnish” a little, sometime in the dead of night. As I say, not in any way suggesting anyone did that: just getting creative with the brief, thinking outside the box and the like.
With noise, telephone calls etc. 20 people in that space need floor to ceiling dividing walls of clear glass except Murrell who gets one with frosted glass.
Central coffee machine of profi Barrista quality (ask Nikla..!) with individual, designer crockery.
CCTV for whistleblowers, a dozen large-screen TVs to watch and adore Nikla’s FMQ live.
🙂 🙂
I have seen many offices similar , big box open plan. relatively cheap build(it’s an empty space virtually no walls)
Do you build walls? Well you can’t because you don’t own the property(OK you could do a deal with the owner)
Partition it?
I wouldn’t simply because you’ll never get it right,so open space
Decorate it? colour ? White, although the SNP taste would walk on the wild side with bloody magnolia( I don’t mean real blood, although. ????)….cost under £5k.
The costing in the article seem accurate ,and there ha been no pruning to get the costs down, as a normal business would do
And at this point I say it it would be virtually impossible to get to the figures in the books.
Alternative spending
Bungs? Private investigators? Serious junkets? Off the books employment etc etc
Of course I’m Not saying that happened
But I doubt the accuracy of the accounts
I’m quite sure all the invoices are to hand? and I’m sure the HMRC have checked the VAT Returns
and at that point in best DD fashion “I’m out”
PS I found it strange to be thinking to big up finances as opposed to reducing cost
“At no point does it say the fixtures and fittings are exclusively for that office, does it?
What other offices do the SNP – as opposed to branches, who post separate accounts, or the Scottish Government – have?
Maybe take a leaf out of Douglas Reynholm’s book. That is to say gold leaf, in the water cooler.
I think one of these will be kept busy.
Though with a 2 year guarantee it would blow the budget by nearly 3 grand, and we can’t very well have that when dealing with loyal members’ donations
You have a PC Maintenance guy on retention. There’s your £40k.
You forgot to include heavy duty paper shredders, Stu, lots of them.
Sanitizer via Government Approved Providers…should take up about £300k
Use the rest on:
An exotic coffee maker and prize beans and cups.
A Wellness Guru on retainer.
The rest will get you a pair of private detectives on retainer to keep an eye on anyone slagging you off on Twitter.
20 sex swings.
Alison Brown. They would get a discount on any artwork they purchased by using the resident black market dealer. He’d also get them discount cars.
just dropped by to see what’s happening. Fuck me,the Sturgeon show rolls on.Who is seriously voting for this party? There’s no chance of me returning home now, I’d self combust within hours.
I was planning a trip north to visit my family, but I’m staying in my coastal bolthole now.
Good to see Stu again, always in awe of your work Sir.
The only thing I could add not specifically mentioned in the office space advert is all the network gear such as local servers, Cat 6e network cabling and floor boxes to each of the desks which you then need to add Desk phones (mitel ones which play the same tone as in the TV series 24). You then need back office software such as a business licence for M365/Teams plus the MS Small Business servers to manage them centrally. You’ll then need a gigabit business internet connection plus servers and the telephony servers unless they are using VOIP (voice over IP – basically a telephone attached to your computer).
Oh and I nearly forgot, add on maintenance contracts and upgrades for each of those servers and PCs over the space of the next 5-10 years.
£229k would seem to be in the region if they were doing a complete refurb and update of all the back end servers. In a rented space they probably only have access to internet coming into the building (but not guaranteed) so they might also need BT to run a new fibre line to that floor.
Suspicious mind?
Yes, I’ll admit to that.
I think there’s more to it than the £600k
From gansecurity.com
What are the Steps in Money Laundering?
There are three main stages in money laundering:
The Placement Stage is when the initial move is made in a financial system.
The Layering Stage is when criminals cut ties that could link the crime with the money. Layering financial transactions is an attempt to obscure a trail that the authorities could follow to find the origin of the money. This is done by moving funds around multiple accounts, splitting the money into smaller amounts, and transferring the payments to various people and places.
The Integration Stage is when the illegally obtained money is transferred back to the criminal. By now, the funds have traveled through a number of financial transactions, and the proceeds of the crime can be used for any purpose
“You have a PC Maintenance guy on retention. There’s your £40k.”
That’d come under staff costs (which went up by £160,000), not computer equipment or furniture.
What other offices do the SNP – as opposed to branches, who post separate accounts, or the Scottish Government – have?
It’s not their own offices I was suggesting.
What about salaries for the poor wee cleaners & tea ladies/men?
You just get a few private detectives to install it.
Done.
Well, as last year involved mainly working from home, i think you can see the scope for ‘essential’ home office kit – more top of the range computers, laptops, tablets, phones, furniture etc. For everyone. And then, as vulnerable, fragile people they will need therapeutic surroundings, so commissioned or existing artwork – just write a cheque with any amount of zeros. The scope for ‘expenses’ is unlimited.
Designer charges can be as high as you want, also specialist software.
Also possible to have one-off design and made furniture and fittings plus, as others have said, artwork and soft furnishings.
Without artist and designer costs though, I don’t see how that space could take over £600k to refurnish.
“Well, as last year involved mainly working from home, i think you can see the scope for ‘essential’ home office kit – more top of the range computers, laptops, tablets, phones, furniture etc.”
But I’ve done that in the article. Everyone got a top-spec laptop, iPad and iPhone, as well as their office PC. Still got nowhere near the total.
How about filling the empty vacant space with some grossly overpriced clapped out shite from Salvage Hunters or if that’s not ultra trendy enough some framed posters with their Vision and their Mission or, How to spin out the job.
Pandemic ‘working form home’ goodies added on to pad it out?
I was too slow as usual! Pandemic WFH has already been dealt with.
Would highly recommend a Fellowes Powershred 425ci large cross cut shredder for each desk, a snip at just £1,407.60 (ex vat) to help keep those unwanted paper files cleared.
There’s usually a catch all clause in company accounts called ‘Sundries’. £40k worth of sundries? That’s 2k per person over a year.
Stress relieving toys.
I’m useless with computers, but know a little about the paintings appropriate for the walls. The old desks and chairs can be re-used. The paintings should be specially commissioned from a Royal Society artist, and would cost £32,125.00 each for an average size. There will be 12 of them:
Mr.& Mrs. Murrell (of course), an SNP treasurer of their choice, and 9 persons known only by a letter of the alphabet.
Don’t forget to price in for a few cages within which to keep any SNP staffer who suddenly goes off message or whistleblows.
You will need a few of these for ring fencing. Only £772.80 each. link to scosarg.com
Double-magpie artwork above each desk?
link to waterstreetgallery.co.uk
What about a super secure safe to keep all that lovely ringfenced cash away from the prying eyes of vile cybernat bloggers
What about this bad boy a snip at just over 2 grand
link to safeoptions.co.uk
1st September 2021
Dear Sirs,
This is a Freedom of Information request.
Could the Scottish Govt. please provide details of all furniture and computer websites visited by staff working in the First Minister’s Office between the period 11.59am 2nd August 2021 and 11.59pm 31st August 2021.
I am requesting this information, having been asked by a friend (lots of friends actually)
Yours sincerely,
Imelda Marcos
What about the ‘Eclipse Desk’ handcrafted to order for only £27,835 by LUXDECO who describe it as ‘Cool and sophisticated, the Eclipse Desk will transform your office space and invite a world of inspiration to your everyday routine’
Just the thing for every Chief Executive and other minions, when splashing out someone else’s money is no problem.
Eazy Peezy…!
I’m going to commission an exclusive desktop ring fence made of approximately 2000 18ct Gold rings (approx £300 each). Inside the fence will be placed the real party accounts. Not even Johnson Carmichael will be allowed to put their hands inside the fence.
Job done!
link to scotlandspeaks.com
Sue Ruddick on a Hermann Miller chair.
link to tinyurl.com
SYP used to be on the ground floor of that building.
The answer is straightforward enough if you think outside the box.
The kitting out of this office space was obviously sub contracted out to a US military contractor.
Well known for charging $500+ for a screwdriver in the pork barrel context of the ever expanding US military budget the question then becomes how did the SNP manage to get this so cheaply?
Please donate my gold coin to the Craig Murray support fund.
How much is a throne or two?
I don’t know how much it would cost but they would need an extra special room and the numbers 101.
You need a container load of redacting pens. Every week.
Well Duh…. Art work on the walls ( Think Carlaw ) will use up the money and be able to be quietly removed when the time is right …
Superior State Of The Art Under Floor Heating Solutions
link to twitter.com
What about a temporary sound proof room kitted out with the latest accoutrements of S&M with appropriate lighting and proper broadcasting cameras capable of the ultra high definition required to transmit across the interwebby to other countries for example France
And you would also require lots of costumes for dressing up because you never know what sex you would wish to be referred to on a working day ,plus we know the propensity certain people have for nappies (soiled or otherwise) or maybe that would encourage the GREENS to do a refurb
Or fuck it I would just give bozos missus the dosh and get her to do it
I outsourced it to a tory councillor bastard who has already bought a cottage in chipping norton on his predicted profits.
Can you sell the gold coin and send me the money as I owe him a further £50,000 ?
Of course, like the murrells – I could be lying.
police Scotland – when are you going to arrest the person responsible for leaking the Alex Salmond smear to the daily record ?
Sick of waiting until you charge her/him/genderwoowoo with perverting the course of justice. You have lost any respect I had.
And are you aware what a ponzi scheme is ? You could ask the FBI, the Swedish Police or peter murrell to explain it to you.
Ooops meant to say I don’t think the SYP is there any more.
In these time when people are working from home would you not have to take into account the cost of providing home workers with desk, office chair, computers, coffee makers etc.
Coffee makers can be pretty pricy.
link to wingsoverscotland.com
Any cost to furnish the office would have to be doubled.
Is anybody working in the SNP offices?
A while back there was a ‘Wanted for Perjury’ notice on the front door of that office block and it was there for about three weeks which would suggest nobody from the SNP had been into the office.
Weekly flowers
Telephone sanitisers
Clothing allowance
1 Logistical Support Consultancy Fees-Murrell and Co £55100
2 Interior Design Consultancy Fees- Murrell and Co £89000
3 Digital secrets management with Bio-metric security £4000
4 Walk in titanium vault with Bio-metric security £32000
5 Hospitality room with bar excluding contents £12000
6 Contents for Bar. Chateau Leffite-Rothschild 1988. 10 x £895; £8950
7 50 year Mac Allan Malt whisky 2 x £100000; £200000
8 Miscellaneous Drinks £12500
9 Anti listening device technology and jamming plus servicing, Murrell and Co £15000.
10 Media management Murrell and Co Consultancy Fees £28500.
11 Nursery support for staff, Murrell and Co £20000
Oh dear I think I have overspent the budget.
Nice one Stu as ever.
link to m.youtube.com
Buy loads of couches and then lose all the spare change down the back of them.
Ruby says:
2 August, 2021 at 2:25 pm
Is anybody working in the SNP offices?
…or outside the SNP offices?
The lavender pimpernel never seems that busy, and is far too modest to take credit for the parlous finances and plummeting membership.
I’m trying to think back to when I was involved in setting up a satellite office.
Firstly I’d discount loads of partitioning, from experience it rarely works in a small space like this, primarily because it f*cks up your air flows and really messes with efficiency of air con and heating. At most you might create a small office for the boss and maybe a meeting room.
Assume everyone has to have: a desk, chair, pedestal, top of range PC, their own printer, and their own shredder (essential), footstools, lamps and a desk fan. You will need low partitioning between desks, for folks to pin up a wall calendar and a photo of the leaderene.
Everyone gets a desk phone, calculator, rubber, pens, pencils, black markers (to redact any court documents), highlighter pens and post its.
Add in a kitchen area equipped with a fridge, microwave and water dispenser.
You need a bank of filing cabinets, coat cupboard or stands, a few communal stationery cupboards. Recycling points with special bins (especially one for the complaints guy).
Now to work out the prices….
Let’s see the receipts for the furniture.
That would confirm ostensibly what was paid. Of course off balance sheet crediting, or better known as kickback could be in play, but for starters just let us see the bills. That way we wouldn’t have the Rev coming out of retirement to expose how even with the deafest of the deafest office equipment the numbers said to have been spent on furniture and equipment to stack up.
But if the Rev is finding retirement difficult maybe he could start a competition into what the remuneration packages are for Murrell and Russell. You know wages, bonus, car or car allowance, pension contributions, private health care, soft loans for e.bikes, permanent health insurance, expenses etc.
Or what about how much the party spent on legal advice over the past few years. Or damages awards to defamed politicians such as Nigel Farage. Maybe the party spent zilch but a wee bird is singing that big money was spent.
And consultants. Another big question.
Anyway, going back to the furniture I think the figure quoted is bum steer. But hey ho, this analytical approach by the Rev is very much setting that out.
Thank fuck Wee Nickla knows nothing. In fact maybe she could enter the Wings completion.
Commission Stephan Balkenhol (sculpture who did £100,000 Everyman statue for Edinburgh council) to do a couple of pieces to brighten up the office.
A couple of drag queens called ‘Everywoman’ would be bright & cheery!
A top-of-the-range firewall to ensure all those WhatsApp messages remain private. Also useful for phishing expeditions. A snip at £80k excluding VAT.
link to watchguard-online.co.uk
Is there any way we could factor in all the pre-election promises made to the public? You know the ones, something along the lines of a free laptop for every school child should we get re-elected etc? Could that be registered as office running costs/expenses do you think? I’m sure there was other similar promises made, there’s one right on the tip of my tongue but i’m just not quite getting it.;)
Oh and can anyone venture a guess as why an organisation would need a full time complaints guy.
Satisfaction built out when you need to have someone like this. I mean when you anticipate that you are going to be deluge£ by complaints what does that tell you. Reinforces exactly what the SNP have become.
An absolute crock of shit.
Fancy 2 group head coffee machine 4k and a office sound system, Speakers and record deck from Art audio of Troon and elec boxes from Linn an easy 100k. This would be a showcase for Scottish manufacturing and worth every penny. Moving on to work transport 20 staff at 5k each for a fancy carbon Mountain bike just in case they have to take to the hills.Sprinkle in some fine French artworks and thats you done.
Wow! that’s just under £20,000 pounds per head, for computer equipment and a desk with a chair. Unless of course there’s a few expensive painting hanging on the walls, and an Italian marble floor to walk on, and Clarice Cliff stationary holders.
It just doesn’t seem feasible that all the money (if any of it actually was) was spent in office equipment and computer equipment.
link to octaneseating.com
Some nice sofas to choose from.
No 9
The Boa – Campana Brothers for Edra
for the foyer?
Could we enter this competition as a team?
Absolutely brilliant piece.
Devastatingly funny, satirical and as sharp as a claymore.
You forgot to include those brown envelopes containing £10,000 in cash for each ‘advisor’in the secret operation to catch and fillet a very famous Scottish fish. If I was Sturgeon I’d ask for the money back.
Then you have the other A4 white envelopes with promises of career advancement under that same peculiar fish.
It all adds up to £500,000.
I recalled a company called Poetic Technologies who produced fantastically expensive workstations. Here’s an old example from 2007:
link to cnet.com
Controls it’s own micro-climate no less.
Too bad PT seem to have gone bust or been taken over and there is no price listed. A neat piece of kit nonetheless.
£230,000 for bespoke asbestos / ceramic multi-channel “Hotline” call handling device, and £386,000 on biggest ever filing cabinet… Both for the new SNP Complaints Officer.
How about 20 of these:
link to arcadecity.co.uk
Every Stalinist Party in Scotland needs twenty of these beauties.
O/T: Rev, can you help find Craig Murray’s prisoner number and cell number, building name location at HMP Edinburgh as several of us btl want to write to him.
I looked at HMP Edinburgh’s site about letters and they said we need the prisoner number and which building exactly he is in at the prison, and then send it to them at 33, Stenhouse Road, Edinburgh EH11 3LN.
HMP said to email to PrisonerLocationEnquiries@sps.pnn.gov.uk to find these details of number and building.
I did that last night and their Kafkaesque reply is:
“Under terms of Data Protection Act we cannot confirm whether someone is detained by Scottish Prisons Service. If you think someone is…you should write to them c/o the address below and if we can identify them from the details you provide…the letter will be passed to them.
You should address the letter to the person you are looking for providing their date of birth, home address, date of conviction or any other details you have.
The letter should be sent to:
Scottish Prison Service, Calton House, 5 Redheughs Rigg, Edinburgh EH12 9HW.
The letter will be passed to the correct person if they can be identified, if they cannot be identified the letter will be destroyed unopened.
Regards,
Legal Services, SPS HQ”
They really want to make it easy to communicate, don’t they? I don’t know Craig’s home address nor conviction date. DOB is per wikipedia 17th October 1958.
SPS ask for different details and to send to them whereas HMP asks for prisoner number and building name and send direct to HMP.
I think sending to HMP seems preferable: can you find out from your contacts what the prisoner number and cell number, building name are, please?
I think it would cheer Craig up to receive letters, preferably sack loads of them.
All items were sourced from e-bay user ‘Sturrelmurgeon Independent Traders’ following a late night, drunken bidding war, unbeknown to each other between the CEO & COO?
A 22 carat gold diamond encrusted box, to hold all the SNP’s indy mandates in that would coast a pretty penny eh.
Oh dear, I think we have just shot ourselves in the foot by giving them ideas. How about an anonymous prize for anyone who can post a picture of inside the actual office?
I think several buckets of Vantablack for all the redactions would probably get us there, given it 8s more valuable than diamonds
link to medium.com%2F@medium.com
Any idea what 20 licences, for all those iPhones, would cost from NSO Group for their Pegasus spyware? It’s only licensed to governments so the SNP would be legitimate buyers, because you can’t trust anyone these days, can you?
I just got another “Hello its us..about that long lapsed membership…why not send us some money, complete this form…”
Perhaps a quality bin would be a more appropriate place to place such correspondence than send to former members
may I suggest one of these for all members:
link to therichtimes.com.
If the SNP are allowed to use Public Contract Scotland Frameworks, and I’m not 100% sure they can, then they should be getting far better IT pricing than you’ve mentioned. The PCs and laptops would be HP through the framework at possibly the best price you’ll find anywhere in the UK Public Sector. The Apple kit would be through the proprietary devices framework, which is also very keenly priced.
I don’t want to be a pedant, but you didn’t mention any IT infrastructure products. They may have updated their servers, storage and networking and this would swallow a pretty large chunk of the budget.
I believe that there’s also a Public Contracts Scotland framework for furniture, although that’s no my field. Maybe someone else would know?
O/T
Laurel Hubbard failed to record a successful lift at the Olympics. How sad, too bad.
@ Willie says at 2:54 pm
“Oh and can anyone venture a guess as why an organisation would need a full time complaints guy.”
Might I suggest to possibly give a close friend a job
“An absolute crock of shit.” Correct
Don’t forget the coffee machine
link to thecoffeeprep.co.uk
You’ve forgotten to factor in the jacuzzi filled with Kentucky Fried Chicken gravy.
Essential for when Ian Blackford calls to do his annual waddleabout with the troops.
Hopefully they’ve got all the receipts for this epic spending spree – otherwise we might be tempted to be ever so slightly suspicious.
I can’t find say anything to say other than I’m sickened by this. It’s not what I’ve been fighting for for 57 years this year.
Is there a Damian Hirst sculpture featuring Scottish Independence pickled in formaldehyde?
Or wait a minute, that might have been the draft manifesto I was reading…
House/ office plants (to purify the air) and crystals ( amethyst madonnas beside every desk, a generous amount on each desk to ensure staff well being and productivity). Dinnae believe me, you just ask my husband.
Oops, I forgot the oil paintings of St Nicola, each done exclusively by Rembrandt ( digging him up to do the deed will be expensive mind) and prayer mats with SNP logos for the faithful to prostrate themselves on twice a day under said oil paintings. And a qualified aromatherapist on hand for when staff get one of those pesky complaints to deal with? How’s that for imagination?
I’m sure Jackson Carlaw can help with paintings… His were likely to be worth a bit, given he didn’t want to part with them!
Just ask the Tory party how to spaff serious £££wonga.
Simples?
Do I get my wee medal?
Hold on a minute Stu, is the money ring fenced, or can we spend it on other things?
Are we allowed to cheat with the figures?
Just asking
One of those new fangled machines that dispenses fanny pads for blokes …
Bullet proof windows (the peasants are revolting), Chairs that tip recalcitrant MSPs into the sharks (SYP). Power tools a là Khashoggi, Rocket escape ship / secret tunnel (pays to plan ahead), those clicky wee executive ball things, “Hot” line to French embassy / Stonewall, laser defence grid for ring fenced vault, to do list / whiteboard for independence planning. Naw – Damn, budget didn’t stretch.
I think Tony Wilson of Factory Records once spent 30 grand on a table for the conference room; it was a one-off, designed by an artist.
Rob Gretton on hearing this tried to attack him.
Factory Records went bankrupt.
Refrigerated bulk carrot storage unit…
20 of these…link to montblanc.com
If I win, I’m going to melt down my gold coin and cast a wee badge in the shape of a
mockingjaymagpie, like they used in the Hunger Games Referendum Campaign.It can take pride of place with my wee Hamish badge on my bunnet, in a mini coat of arms, with Hamish the Lion dexter and the wee Magpie sinister… very, very, sinister in fact.
Dan, I think that is a sensible and prudent purchase. Would it also be a good idea to buikd a climate and humidity controlled room to hold the stick and string that Nicola will need to hold up said carrot?
@Hazel Lyon
About £400K. More if it comes furnished with the getaway helicopter – but breaking windows in order to use it would probably count as a structural modification
Is there a flood protection
scamscheme like Hawick? That’ll cost£40million, err,£80million, err£120million, £180million…Oh, it’s a 3rd floor property that’s never flooded before? No problemo. £450million, that’s my final offer and we’ll throw in a new Scottish Parliament building for free.
You’d need to have a lot of state of the art medical equipment
Remember, the staff are sensitive souls who can go into anaphylactic shock at the mere sight of a ribbon or sticker
Never mind the possibility of heart attacks on hearing or seeing lesser mortals misgendering and mispronouning all over the place
Top of the range defibrillators alone
One for each member of staff
Would eat a chunk of that leftover budget
link to seton.co.uk
Vials of new strains of covid to be released onto the electorate to stall further progress towards Indy when there’s nowt else left to use as an excuse…
Is there a helipad nearby? D Trump is selling a helicopter, that should do the trick. She may need a fast-ish getaway very soon.
@Hazel Lion
Ha ha ha ha! thanks for that laugh I needed that.
Breeks
They’ll also need a gold plated cage for thon magpie.
I think the Wings BTL Team have cracked it.
When do we get our gold medal?
I’m monitoring your re-retirement carefully, any further breaches and I’ll be obliged to reinstate your Smarties allowance. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
@Fairliered
Fuck me, I did my circle cutting/shaping stuff with my custom circle jig (9mm ply) on my Trend router table with an el cheapo 6/8mm collette choice. Simple overhead guard with the screw in table rest in action.
Made, shaped the platform of my extra steep wobbleboard platform on it. Also roughed out a base cylinder for the slightly elongated half orb for underneath (shaped by hand with a rasp) on it. It hangs with the rest of the router jigs. A pin can be inserted at different distances for different diameters. It has a thin balk underneath which fits in the fence track on the table. All done with scrap.
HITLER BODY ODOUR AIR FRESHNERS,
FRESH LEATHER, DUBBIN OROMA, JACKBOOT JASPER,
SALT N SWEAT, PARANOID PYREA, PRETENTIUOS ODE TOILET.
TO KEEP THAT CLIQUE TIGHT TOGETHER.
The Gordon Lamb building is hidden away down a dark alley with only a back door.
At the front of that building there was a Pizza Express (made famous in the Alex Salmond trial)
link to tinyurl.com
It’s closed down now and that building is up for rent.
Did anyone add the Pizza Express takeaways to the office expenses?
link to tinyurl.com
Spotted this in Google maps while looking at Jacksons Entry.
What is that?
A gold-tipped ring fence for the office to keep out prying eyes?
Ruby says:
2 August, 2021 at 7:59 pm
link to tinyurl.com
Spotted this in Google maps while looking at Jacksons Entry.
What is that?
—
Scottish Poetry Library
robbo says:
2 August, 2021 at 7:16 pm
Is there a helipad nearby? D Trump is selling a helicopter, that should do the trick. She may need a fast-ish getaway very soon.
Reply
Helipad on the roof of the Gordon Lamb building?
Last time I passed there was something parked on the roof.
It might be a helicopter although it looks like a digger.
Anyone going for a walk in the park? Perhaps you could check out the Gordon Lamb building helipad.
Scott says:
2 August, 2021 at 8:14 pm
Ruby says:
2 August, 2021 at 7:59 pm
link to tinyurl.com
Spotted this in Google maps while looking at Jacksons Entry.
What is that?
—
Scottish Poetry Library
Reply
LOL.
I was talking about the weird alien thingy in the reflection in the window.
Ruby says:
2 August, 2021 at 8:22 pm
Reply
LOL.
I was talking about the weird alien thingy in the reflection in the window.
—
That’s the camera Google use to take pictures…
Maybe these were purchases for business use at home?
The car is one of Google’s which take photos as they are driven round. The gadget is a four-camera mounting.
The photos show up on google earth
Actually not a high budget at all, I spent some 20 years fitting out offices in Scotland and have spent much more than this. I’ve designed and had made tables costing £20,000 reception desks costing over £100, 000, and £500 for an office chair is not out of the tree. One client had his £180 asquare metre wallpaper removed and replaced because he didn’t like it.
Then again, my clients were usually companies who made millions in profits. I’ve fitted out a lot of business of this size for a tenth of the figures quoted.
You pays you money…… (or in this case your members money)!
If people need to work from home a lot – which is much easier to sell these days with Covid restrictions – “home office” furnishings can soak up any number of expense items, which might even mean several offices for key personnel…
Cloning and lobotomy equipment to churn out perpetual Sturrell carrotmongers and BothVotesSNP voting fodder…
#StuckInBadAcidTrip
Scrap what I said before, the pictures on the wall should be two each of the following to remind the people in the room of their shame. All painted with eyes that seem to follow you wherever you are in the room:
Alex Salmond; Mark Hirst; Craig Murray; Marion Millar; Joanna Cherry; Stuart Campbell.
Cost in London is roughly £60 per sq ft for top end refurbishment. The SNP must be paying Monaco prices.!!.
The money was spent on a single, custom made, piece of furniture.
– they spent it on a :
MANDATE CUPBOARD
– it’s a cupboard for all your “mandates”; once you get a lot, it makes a mess, now you have somewhere to put them.
The SNP are “24 Mandate Party People”
Mel: “reception desks costing over £100, 000”
Pish.
link to twitter.com
And for those who can’t access the link by @DeanMThomson
“News on the missing ‘ring fenced’ indyref2 fund:”
“Police investigating 12 counts of fraud”
“Leaked copy of SNP’s 2020 accounts show £670,000 spent on furnishings & new computers in 2020”
“Unclear where that money came from since donations to SNP dropped 55% during pandemic”
Maybe She/Her has built a special round table for herself and her chosen menagerie of narcissists,
like the SS done in Wewelsburg,
She/Her on the gilded throne with Peter opposite and Humza to her right and Mhairi to her left,
David Leask,Leeona June Dorrian,Alex Prentice,David Clegg and Leslie Evans,Sarah Smith,Kirsty Blackman,Swinney and Cumfy Pete plus seats for others,
i checked with a mate who is a chippy and he says,
a very large custom Sandalwood hand carved round table inlade with runic symbols and rainbows and unicorns plus seating and arm bands would cost nearly £600,000.
As others have alluded to, it is art – but a very specific kind of art. Nicola would of course need a large portrait oil painting, prepared from several sittings with a top artist – easily 40k, espcially if she has her concubine, Peter, included in it.
And, if it comes under the 40k, she could perhaps also get ‘his and hers’ thrones, where the SNP stupidly (they still think she’ll call indyref) loyal can come, genuflect and prostrait themselves before her on a daily basis.
Maybe something like this would do for both of them,
link to thronekingdom.com
Order say a private detective agency listed as office decor consultants for £350k then spend £36k on desks and chairs. Guessing the detectives can look in windows of known contacts of a certain former FM to pick up decor tips right?
Order Twitter troll farm as office software consultants for £100k, add some press for media software consultants at £100k then spend £30k on equipment
Another disgusting Judge so far removed from reality. This piece of excrement should have been given a *minimum* of 2yrs jail for each emergency worker assaulted. And no parole! There’s one bonus, thank f@ck this wasn’t in Scotland, they’d probably line up the victims and tell the scumbag to have another go. link to archive.is
mel says:
2 August, 2021 at 8:45 pm
….One client had his £180 asquare metre wallpaper removed and replaced because he didn’t like it.
I’ve seen a parquet floor put in, looked stunning to me, but then removed because the customer didn’t like it. They reckoned it was squint, and it was, but had to be running off in places because the room wasn’t square. The guy laying it used his judgement and experience and it looked right to my eye, or as right as you could ever get it.
I think from memory the fella had centred the pattern on the fireplace. Judgement call, but I reckon 99% of people would have done the same. Don’t know the cost, but it wouldn’t be cheap and in the thousands.
If you didn’t like it, buy a rug. Spare a wee thought for the poor fella who just put it in, only to see it ripped up with a kango.
Given that the Murrell`s must have been crapping themselves senseless over the past two years and are sure to have been spending a considerable amount of time in the lavi, I would imagine their bog roll costs would be vast. But of course we are talking about the Murrells who do not regard themselves as ordinary mortals so every day toilet tissue would not be acceptable. No, we are talking about specially produced gold lame at £250 per roll.
So 2 rolls each per day = £1,000, that’s £30,000 a month, over £350,000 for a year, £700,000 over two years.
So there you have it, no money on furniture or equipment it was all spent on bog roll.
I remember a few years back, there was a some carry on in Westminster about people spending money and it was emphasised that people should always keep their receipts. I’m pretty sure it was John Prescott who said that he even gets a receipt from his window cleaner. It was in all the papers for a couple of days, couldn’t really be missed plus it was good advice for free.
So, of course the SNP will have kept the receipts for all this spending and will be able to present them to dispel any doubts or rumours and that’ll put everyones gas at a peep.
(In case anybody doesn’t get this, I actually think there’s zero chance of them producing any receipts for anything.)
An expandable dictionary of gender terms and pronouns?
A multi user herpetarium won’t come cheap!
10 input ‘Corupter greedy ********’
20 Return to line 10
END
Even if they did spend this money on fittings (which obviously they didn’t) that’s still a complete fraud on those who donated to a fund for a referendum campaign, no? So even if it was believed, how is it even relevant?
Sturgeon’s selection of designer wigs and sunglasses for those ‘incognito days’.
High end human hair wigs can set you back a cool 2.5k each. A dozen of those would hoover up 30k.
Your Chanel designer shades to complete the look would easily soak up another 10k for three or four pairs.
If you’re going to the bother of moving about without public, or more importantly press, recognising who you are, you may as well do it in style – 40k worth of style no less. It pays to keep ’em guessing…
There…I claim my prize.
Or is it?
10 Print‘Corupter greedy ********’
20 Return to line 10
END
Be a long time since I owned a commodore.
Well hello folks, it looks like I may have to find new pastures whilst Craig Murray is in the Dark.
This is a good game, as Wings blazes as a quasar through its own Far Side purdah. Good to see it’s illumination.
With the Money and Computer kit and Control Room. I would have expected Scotland having put a kilt on the Moon! Or at least Independence. But that would need real dedicated rocket scientist types.
Onivar. Burn brightly and regularly WoS. We are in need of Lighthouse’s to keep us on course.
I can spend the money for the computer equipment. Overclockers do some nifty systems. Can easily spend £10K on an individual machine. Add in some security software and a 5G connection (useful for on the move).
As for the furniture? No chance.
I suspect the custom made carpet, with £600k ‘woven through’ it won’t have been cheap? I’m unsure if that covers the whole floor? Or is only for display purposes in the middle, and surrounded by a protective ‘ring fence’ to stop stiletto heels poking holes in it?
However, with all staff working from home, they WILL have needed 20 of those luxury, insulated armadillo-shaped garden-office pods. Built, kitted out, delivered and installed in the relevant 20 gardens. I’m not sure what they cost nowadays? The ones with a toilet and kitchenette area are obviously more expensive.
PS, does this space being for rent mean that the Sumerians have given up on Europe? And returned to Ur of the Chaldees? I suppose Abraham’s dad must have retired eventually.
PPS If Alba was to rent the vacant floor, this could create all sorts of espionage and sitcom opportunities. Although, we’ve got to find the money to put about 5,000 names on a ‘Founders’ Wall’. Who knows what THAT will cost? I hope it’s not as fictional as the ring fence.
O/T
More ‘Scotland is shite’ guff from some UK state broadcaster employees, literally.
link to bbc.co.uk
I think the guy who made the graphs and “interactive dashboard” took lessons from Steve Sayers.
link to youtube.com
“6 hundred grand for a fooking referendum”
– if only
Actually, I’m very disappointed – was hoping for a Spectre/Strangelove/Legion of Doom(Woke) vibe where Murrell can lounge Jabba the Hutt style, in his bondage gear; Alyn Smith in hotpants dances to techno and Nicola dominates her slaves – it would be like Andy Warhol’s Factory but with ugly, untalented people.
– some velvets, because why not?
link to youtube.com
ps – since he’s not exactly a serial killer or drugs kingpin, Murray should have “privileges” right? I hope he can access Wings from the nick – all the best, and not forgotten.
This ringfenced £600,000, suppose they turn around and say ‘Yes, we’ve spent it on office upgrades’ or ‘legal fees’, whatever, then what’s anyone actually going to do about it apart from complain about being ripped off?
I mean, can the SNP expect a flurry of small claims court cases from people trying to reclaim their donations or what?
What I’m getting at here is that it looks like a bit of a stand off with the SNP ready to call peoples bluff, like:
‘Yeah, so? We’ve spent it. What you gonna do about it?’
Unless everybody who has made a donation, which is maybe in the hundreds or thousands, actually take action and raise court cases, then SNP are going to get away with it scot free. So what if they happen to lose a few disgruntled supporters? It’s not like they need them for any forthcoming referendum or anything.
Keep up misty, our fine Polis Scotland are currently investigating multiple complaints, and we can expect that the PF will do the needful.
Written and verbal promises made, and broken.
Theft by deception. Fraud!
Fancy furnishings, paying for a big mouths ego, or feathering the lavender nest aren’t in the same universe as referendum expenditure.
It’s Murrells ring that’ll need fenced, when he joins Craig up at the big hoose.
😉
I started with the server room. £5k each for a couple of cluster server notes, plus that again for the licensing. Another £30k or so for clean-room tech. Then added M$ workstations rather than apples. I only got up to £120k-odds for all the IT.
Oh, and 20 users needs four of these – link to google.com
Re Hunger Games. Not a Magpie a Mocking Jay, appropriate for this subject of discussion.
I’m on my second Marks. Excellent chair. My gaming chair is a Poang though, also from IKEA.
I don’t know much about furniture or buying.
My guess is there are pretty ordinary desks in fairly ordinary chairs. Paintings would do it, but again, no. I’m guessing about 150K was used on the lot.
What I’m wondering is which of the pair gave the final sign-off on the spending. Maybe only one of them. Maybe either Sturgeon or Murrell are wondering where the money went.
I think the only reason they’re married is to make sure they can’t bear witness in a court of law against each other. But I wonder who’s leading who? Are they collaborating in destrying the SNP from within? Or is one of them doing it alone by encouraging the other’s narcism?
Dominic Berry says:
3 August, 2021 at 3:12 am
I think the only reason they’re married is to make sure they can’t bear witness in a court of law against each other.
—
Spouses are compellable witnesses, see Section 86 of Criminal Justice and Licensing (Scotland) Act 2010.
link to legislation.gov.uk
The SNP today is really a sort of adult-oriented Monsters, Inc.
The plot of Monsters, Inc. involves a bunch of monsters who go around scaring the life out of kids so that they can harness their fear and convert it to a form of energy. It’s quite a dark and sinister basis for a kid’s movie, when you think about it…
Anyway, I can’t imagine SNP HQ without a machine that converts fear to some sort of energy. It’s the only thing that makes sense of the last 6 years.
I reckon a machine like that would cost a few quid. Probably about 670 grand.
Can we bribe one of the cleaners or a delivery guy to take a picture for us?
Wow.
Food shortages is one thing, but have you tried buying a bag of cement lately?
Breeks says:
3 August, 2021 at 6:36 am
Wow.
Food shortages is one thing, but have you tried buying a bag of cement lately?
Yes – it’s impossible. Is Boris building a bunker?
Ah Breeks I don’t think we’ve seen the half of the shortages of essential supplies. But we will do and very soon.
Yes cement is in short supply and impacting major civil engineering projects. But so are other material such as plasterboard as another example.
And in the shops the bare supermarket shelves are there for all to see. Save for the initial panic buying in the early commencement of COVID, shortages were not an issue. But they are now despite lockdown being over.
So what has changed. Well the government would tell it is Pingdemic. Oh really. Nothing to do with Brexit, nothing to do with all the Europeans who have left the country in their hundreds of thousands. Trade and importation barriers and the removal of key workers to drive lorries, work on farms, work on construction sites are now coming into play big time.
And in a couple of weeks, informed opinion is saying that these shortages are going to get very much worse, and that the HGV drivers are being set up to take the fall for the chaos that is going to ensue.
So first it was the dirty foreigners and immigrants from afar that were dragging down our country, our nation, our British way of life. Then it was the nearer immigrants, the Poles, and all of the other Europeans taking our jobs, consuming our social security benefits. And of course EU itself which was destroying our way of life, taking our money, ( and presumably now having commandeered the
Big Yellow Bus with the weekly £100 million of NHS dosh )
Makes one proud to be British, and of course that Pesky Parish Parliament in Edinburgh will soon be gone.
That’s it rant over. Mind the shortages though. Things are going to get rough.
Ah well Breeks, we all need to stock up now. Hoarding I know but this is all going to get much worse. And so in true Tory fashion, it’s every man for themselves, bugger thy neighbour, and hard luck for the feeble and infirm. I mean that’s what we voted for, didn’t we.
Perhaps they are just buying
the stuff under PFI ?
Anyone tried to buy decking boards ?
Best speech that I’ve seen a Scottish person make in two years was Neil Oliver talking about ditching your scam app and protecting our children. Very blood and soil.
Neil Oliver is more likely to deliver independence than the SNP thieves, child abusers and sociopaths.
Faraday cage the entire office ?
link to sciencealert.com
How about Mont Blanc Pens for the staff just like the leader’s clicky pen ?
“The SNP’s accounts are also independently audited”.
By any chance would that be by a self regulated accounting profession? You’d think that any disproportionate spending would be a red flag for some detailed checks, ie looking at the invoices to see what the total figures were made up of. But then again, maybe not.
‘Tony Blair’s expenses were shredded ‘by mistake’ when they were the subject of a legal bid to have them published’ – No Expenses Spared Winnett & Rayner
‘KPMG hit with £6m fine and Carillion’s former accountant KPMG has been fined £6m and “severely reprimanded” by a watchdog over another botched audit’. – Independent link to archive.is
You know what? If life in the UK actually is about to full-on Tonto mental, and we’re coming to blows over £150 bags of cement, then perhaps the most important resource Scotland could ever have is it’s Border.
And a padlock.
It’s not for any prejudice or political point scoring, it’s simply a necessity to control the overall stability and buoyancy of the vessel, by regulating what goes out and what comes in.
The horse is looking skittish and getting ready to bolt. Can we maybe start thinking about shutting the stable door at some stage before the inevitable?
Not saying do it, but just be ready to. This shit could actually get serious.
There is no reason why Scotland should run short of cement with a LaFarge Factory in Dunbar churning it out.
There is no reason why Scotland should run out of timber products. Look out the window.
There is no reason why Scotland should run short of food, energy or fuel.
There is no reason why Ireland should have run out of potatoes.
Priti Patel in October 2020 suggesting the UK should threaten Ireland with food shortages if it didn’t capitulate to Westminster’s demands on the Irish backstop. Ya whAT???
There is no reason why Scotland should have ANY political prisoners… except perhaps those cheating, lying, corrupt, conspiring fraudsters who have squandered virtually all of Scotland’s Constitutional strengths. The ones you know, who should already be impeached and in the dock.
20 x mid range Mac Pro towers. Will get you to the £200,000 and a further handful of MacBook pros and a handful of iPads will round off the extra £30,000.
Who do I send my address to for the gold coin 😀 seriously though that’s how to spend that money almost instantly on hardly any tech. The base Mac Pro is £5500 and with some mid range upgrades you will easily hit £10,000 you can also spend way way more on a Mac Pro.
Breeks at 8.04
Also
‘The Construction Leadership Council predicted in March that the situation would get worse before any improvement was seen. This is the latest in an ongoing lack of building materials such as steel, timber, plastics, pitched roofing, paints, coatings etc. The council says it believes there will be no let up for at least six months.
According to Andrew Simpson, director at Hanson Packed Products, the company has been forced to implement a cement allocation in May 2021. Unfortunately this couldn’t be maintained, and they have had to reduce the allocation.
On a more positive note, there are alternatives to cement being developed, one which uses recycled asbestos’.
So using recycled asbestos is the good news!
link to multibuildingservicesltd.co.uk
And the UK keep postponing when the Brexit customs fcukup will start to kick in for real.
‘UK forced to delay checks on imports from EU by six months. Introduction postponed until 2022 because border post infrastructure will not be ready in time’-
link to archive.is
link to m.youtube.com
I bet they spent the money on dildos rent boys and drugs
Sorry meant to say Dido.
@ Mist001 at 1.04
At present, all is required is a request for the return of the donation; mine was returned within 48 hours. That might not be the case if all the donors made similar requests, because there isn’t enough in the coffers to cover that.
@ me
All *that* is required.
‘…then perhaps the most important resource Scotland could ever have is it’s Border.
And a padlock.’
Sounding like a proper nationalist there Breeks.
Same can be said for any sovereign nation.
Indeed without a proper border (whose integrity is not at the mercy of some multi national union be it GB or EU) a nation has no real sovereignty.
@ crazycat
Yeah but what I’m saying is that if the SNP admitted they’ve spent the money on something else, then there wouldn’t be any money left anyway, so all people could do is raise a small claims case.
link to bitchute.com It’s time to stop the Government from abusing us.
I’ll jump in. There are 3 categories:
Furnishings. Computer Equipment and Software development.
S/W development could easily be the biggest part even if listed last. Here is a scenario that could plausibly cover all three even taking account that Standard office equipment is already covered as listed in the thread. Note: All this stuff is normally a Service contract as opposed to buying assets (PCs, printers photocopiers, kitchen vending machines etc).
Lets say I contract a company to create top of the range, bespoke, Digital Boardroom and analytics service.
RFP covers : Full sound isolation, full digital presence and all the IT equipment, video conferencing and bandwidth needed. Additional security package to be added.
Then I want a full analytics capability (EG SAPs digital boardroom). However all this still doesnt get SNP top managements Excel sheets and internal polling data to look good in the Monthly board meeting!
So you hire a software startup company (Via the Murrels startup why not?) to develop software via APIs that converts data on their local Excel and Access/Opensql DB and integrates it to this fully online cloud analytics service.
200 FTE (Full Time Equivalent) man days on development
100 man days project management for the Analytics software project.
50 man days on training and support. + whatever other features they need. eg. Full woke user experience and graphics design.
Then add a modern open space area for VIP visits designed by some woke aware interior designer and ‘all done in the best possible taste’.
Not to forget a small recreation area with a digital dartboard and overlay of Alex Salmonds image to chill out and de-stress.
Already over budget.
You have missed out a top end ? table, bats and balls
Table tennis
Raising 600k for a very specific purpose and promising to “ring-fence” the money raised… but then spending it all instead on your “run-of-the-mill” expenses is fraud in anyone’s books… oh except Police Scotland and COPFS’s. (But then they think hair pinging is a serious sexual assault so it is hardly surprising their judgement is ‘completely fucked’, to use precise legal terms.)
But if it then looks like the run-of-the-mill expenses are anything but ‘usual’ or ‘normal’ and in fact are highly implausible… then that elevates the potential crime here to a whole different level.
So you raise money using false pretenses, spend it on something else and now the something else looks dodgy as well… hmmm starting to see a pattern here.
I was thinking Feng Shui consultants to properly arrange the furniture might account for several hundred thousand pounds of the missing funds. Surely this merits a shiny coin.
BTW you should consider launching it as a cryptocurrency. We will need it anyway if we go independent because rest assured the useless cunts at SNP HQ will never ever come up with a plan for currency post YES.
The money was used to buy a mythical golden fleece from some dodgy greek guy Peter Murrell met on holiday.
It is kept in a brief case in a safe in his office. He and Nicola spend hours just standing gazing it with big stupid grins on their faces.
It is very much like that brief case in Pulp Fiction that bathes you in a golden glow when opened.
Send me my gold coin now please.
Ms S.Ruddick
Golden Lamb House
Edinburgh
@ Mist001 at 1:04 am
You are correct in that you can’t take the SNP Unless you have given them the money,you have no reason.
Until filed there is little point in complaining
What would filing do?
Well the possibility of having the effect that prior to
“Office of Fair Trading v Abbey National plc and Others [2009] UKSC ” where the enormity of claim in the Small Court was so great that it choked the court system, I point out that was north and south of Gretna. In the SNP’s case that would only be Scotland***
The quantity of claimants in Scotland is not going to be enough to block the Sheriff Court, but it does in today’s climate cause a problem for the courts
***
If you are/were a resident in England or Wales,You could take action via the English system, which would cause the defendant a fair bit of bother
It would be able to be done via Money Claims On Line(MCOL)
(it is a HM court Site cost starts at £35 less than Scotland, and goes up, MCOL also lets you claim for expenses the £35 and Interest at 8%)
I have to say I am holding back a thought ,that would potentially floor the Sturgeon crew ( a donor is a requirement which is a necessity for the claim a member makes it better still)
@ Ian at 8:01 am
“The SNP’s accounts are also independently audited”.
I think that was a quote by Sturgeon I believe, written in the Herald, and doesn’t stand up
There is only one audited set of account/reports .
All member should have access to those items
In house gender neutral brothel.,
running costs hard to work out!
My guess: Peter Murrell Holdings (Bermuda) Ltd bought a painting of a Victorian dude for £30,000, and leased it to the SNP for ten times that price.
Either that, or some accounting genius has managed to re-categorise legal fees as furnishings.
Decor? How about an abstract installation of a Ring Fence by Tracey Emin or Geoff Koons? Choose your own lump sum.
Stuart, sorry, but based on the SNP’s 2019 accounts they are, for VAT purposes – “partially exempt”. This means the SNP can only recover VAT suffered on costs which are wholly or partially attributable to the income it earns and which is liable to VAT (0%, 5%, 20%). “Political Income – (eg member dues) is VAT exempt (not the same as 0%) and VAT on costs wholly or partially attributable to exempt income or non-business activity is never recoverable. The SNP will calculate how much input tax it can recover in line with the partial exemption method it will have agreed with HMRC.
See link to search.electoralcommission.org.uk
“…Note 1
Value added tax (including irrecoverable VAT)
The Party agreed a partial exemption formula with HM Revenue & Customs and recovers VAT on this basis. In addition, conference income has been deemed a vatable supply. VAT is charged on conference income and costs…”
Note 15
Irrecoverable VAT (2019) £340,451, (2018) £130,419
An explanation of irrecoverable VAT is included within the value added tax section of note 1…”
You would need to know the how the SNP attributes VAT on costs and its partial exemption recovery rate before estimating the VAT impact on its spend completely accurately.
Re: StanStan on VAT
It’s such a pity that StanStan can’t be let loose on ALL the SNP’s hidden HQ accounts kept secret from Douglas Chapman and the members of the Finance & Audit Committee. Now THAT would be interesting!
They will need lots of rugs to sweep all the lies and corruption under the carpet, rug upon rug, upon rug jump in case any of it comes to the surface!
Hatuey says:
3 August, 2021 at 4:33 am
The SNP today is really a sort of adult-oriented Monsters, Inc.
The plot of Monsters, Inc. involves a bunch of monsters who go around scaring the life out of kids so that they can harness their fear and convert it to a form of energy. It’s quite a dark and sinister basis for a kid’s movie, when you think about it…
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A very allegorical cartoon, if the stories about “blood-drinking elites” has any basis in reality…
I know, I know! They consulted with Adam Neumann of WeWork for internal decorating tips and how to turn themselves into a political cult. That should account for the rest of the monies!
Just remember though folks that while you were being warned about where the SNP would lead you, including evidence and their own statements, many of you were busily dribbling about the evils of a president across the Atlantic and denigrating those who were foolish enough to put hope in him.
Just pointing that out.
You were all warned who they were and what they were going to do, including by your very own Mr Campbell.
If the Scottish independence movement had done what id said 2 years ago, which was write to you local SNP MSP and tell them that no votes will be going there way until they get back on track and then actually refuse to support them in any way until they do, then you would be looking at an entirely different cast of characters and a Scottish Independence movement that has shown it will break any politician that does not carry through on their mission.
Instead, what we have are mini tyrants who KNOW you are too fucking weak and stupid to be much of a threat and that’s why they act like they do.
Having it all pointed out to you by a good journalist (WOS) is one thing. You actually growing a fucking spine and learning to think for yourselves is entirely another.
Scotland deserves the SNP. IF you arent going to learn from history then you will need hard lessons in the present. Mr Murray and all the other victims of this regime are collateral damage of your weak stupidity and unwillingness to look at ugly realities.
Get it? Its on each of you who cast your votes to support an utterly and obviously immoral and criminal regime
Fucking idiots.
A set of Bitcoin mining computers, stored at Bute House and using taxpayer-funded electricity, to generate 600k worth of bitcoin to pay back the ring fenced money?
As the Rev Stu slips back into his retirement – for another wee while anyway – plans are well underway for the coronation of King Alexander in the grand setting of Greenock Town Hall. Auld fashioned folk like me who prefer a proper contest for the leadership should read this and take the necessary action (if members of the Alexba party).
link to jaggy.blog
Jaggy.blog says:
4 August, 2021 at 5:17 pm
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In response to your blog post.
1. You are entitled to your opinion about the structure of any political party.
2. The defence counsel did not convince the jury to acquit. You have no lawful means to possess any knowledge of the deliberations of the jury other than the verdicts delivered, following a trial.
3. The “could have been a better man” quote is actually a mis-quote. The word “perhaps” had meaning known to him that you have used as an affirmation. Do you understand how court cases proceed in the High Court of the Justiciary?
4. If ALBA are aspiring to be the 3rd force in Scottish Politics, they aren’t wishing for the bronze medal merely to have a share of the influence currently wielded by the largest party, be that at local or national level. (6000 members for a first conference of a party currently being led by a person who retains your admiration suggests a united effort by the membership to engage in the building of the structures required to achieve their political aims) Get it right, and they could go back to their constituencies and prepare for Government within 5-10 years.
5. With regard to the standing of Alex Salmond. He remains a PC. HMA v Alex Salmond returned an acquittal on all charges.
6. It’s not for me to decide moderation policy here, but if I was in charge of it, I would ban you from linking to your own blog in support of your own comments.
6. Your Sinn Fein analogy is clamped by the obvious flaw in your understanding of 3rd force.
7. You appear to be seeking to hold the data of those proposing to attend the ALBA conference. I’m not sure if you have the lawful power to hold that data electronically, let alone solicit for it.
8. I’ve read a couple of your articles. I’ll not read any more.
£670,000
That should get Wet Pishfart and Jelly Backbones performing the old classic
” Who’s Sorry Now” live fro SNP HQ.
Watch them trying to contain their smug grins whilst performing.
Worth a wee medal?
The SNP gave a contract to some outsourced company to furnish it etc & facilitate & manage it?? Just a DWP sold off Jobcentres and now rent them back and pay for the facilitation & security etc from G4s? Giving out Gov contracts to pals is the in thing is it not?
Software development is bloody expensive, don’t you know?
Ask BoJo The Clown and his gang of sociopaths that paid 143,524 squintillions for a Test & Trace app.
</sarcasm>