Wings Over Scotland

Here’s a passage from Crown Agent John Logue’s recent BBC interview in which he described the crime for which Peter Murrell was just sentenced to five years and three months in prison. You’ll note that we’ve highlighted a few words and phrases in red.

JOHN LOGUE: I think the best way I can describe it is in some ways this case was no different from embezzlement that people might recognize in their daily lives. If people are a member of a church or a bowling club or a golf club, if someone in that organization has access to money on behalf of the society or the club and takes it and spends it in the local shops, that’s embezzlement.

And in some ways this case was as simple as that because what we were able to prove after the police investigation and after our investigation was that that was what Peter Murrell had done here. He had access to and control of party funds and he used it for his own purposes and that’s the crime of embezzlement. 

And now let’s just swap out those words for some very similar ones.

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We’ve just sent this letter to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service.

Dear Sirs/Madams,

Thank you for your response, which I have considered with care.

I note you have advised that “full consideration was given to whether the crime of fraud could be established. That investigation did not disclose sufficient evidence of fraud, or for any crime other than the crime of embezzlement. These conclusions were agreed by the procurator fiscal, by Crown Counsel who was a KC and by a reviewing KC.”

I agree that the evidence to which I have pointed demonstrates the crime of embezzlement, as I said to you in my previous correspondence. The point is, however, that there are two instances of embezzlement: that to which Mr Murrell pled guilty (ie his embezzlement from the SNP); and that which has seemingly not been the subject of investigation and certainly not prosecution, for reasons which remain unclear.

The evidence to which I have pointed admits of little doubt. In short:

1. Money was ingathered by the SNP on the basis of assurances that it would be “ringfenced” for defined purposes
2. That money was thereafter subject to a trust under Scots law, in terms of which it could only be spent for those defined purposes
3. The First Minister of Scotland has now confirmed that the money was spent on other matters.

It really is that simple. It defies belief to think that the Procurator Fiscal and two KCs could look at that simple factual matrix and conclude that there was no evidence of a crime.

That being so inherently unlikely, I can only assume that those involved were not considering that point, and were (as your last reply suggests) considering rather whether or not it could be shown that fraud was involved in the solicitation of donations. I can quite understand that proving fraudulent intent at the time the donations were sought would be difficult.

But again (and at the risk of repetition) that is not the point. Assume that the donations were solicited in bona fide for the defined purposes: thus no fraud in ingathering the money.

That does not answer the question which I am posing, which is on what possible basis could it be lawful for those donations then to be spent on anything other than the defined purposes for which they were solicited?

I thus invite you to reconsider.

I should say that I have instructed the drafting of civil proceedings based on fraudulent breach of trust, which as I am sure you are aware is the civil equivalent of embezzlement.

Given that fact, I dare to suggest that it would be rather embarrassing for the Crown Office to be found to have ignored repeated requests to look at this very point if a civil court decides that what I have described above as a simple factual matrix does indeed show that which I contend is blatantly obvious: embezzlement, in the form of the wrongful use of money held on trust by those to whom it had been entrusted.

Regards etc,

Rev. Stuart Campbell

As ever, we’ll keep you updated.

And in relation to those last two paragraphs, if you were a donor to any of the SNP’s “ringfenced” fundraisers and you’re not happy that your money was stolen and used to elect the likes of Karen Adam, Lloyd Melville, Patricia Gibson, Alyn Smith, Kirsten Oswald and – ultimate trolling – Colin Beattie instead, please drop us a line via the Wings contact form. We’ll be getting in touch with all respondents very soon.

We have received a further reply from the Crown Office.

Alert readers may note that while Wings has repeatedly noted that the misappropriation of the fundraiser money by the SNP could constitute either fraud OR embezzlement (or both), entirely separate to the embezzlement FROM the SNP by Peter Murrell, the Crown Office continues – as its agent John Logue did in a recent BBC interview – to address only the possibility of fraud, which would be by far the more difficult of the two to prove, and to ignore the elephant in the room, which is that no less a personage than the First Minister has already admitted to spending all of the money on a purpose other than that which it was raised for.

The response is therefore plainly unsatisfactory, which we will deal with in our own reply within the next 24 hours, which will again be drafted by counsel. We will of course publish it here once it’s sent, so stay tuned.

For any of you who haven’t caught it yet, my interview from Monday’s BBC Scotcast (which is also available on Spotify).

Sadly due to a summer scheduling quirk the video version won’t go out on the telly, and seemingly not on the BBC YouTube page either, so you’ll just have to listen to the audio and somehow live without seeing my gorgeous face.

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We’ve already discussed the contents of the videos released last week by the BBC containing interviews with Assistant Chief Constable Stuart Houston of Police Scotland and Crown Agent John Logue of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service.

But videos (especially lengthy ones) are always a bit of a pain to reference, and these are incredibly significant documents, so we thought it’d be quite useful to post the full transcripts too, with the text tidied up (taking out all the “um”s and “eh”s and so on) for ease of reading.

This is the interview with John Logue (Stuart Houston’s is here):

And below is what’s said in it. We’ve added a comment here and there, in red.

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We’ve already discussed the contents of the videos released last week by the BBC containing interviews with Deputy Chief Constable Stuart Houston of Police Scotland and Crown Agent John Logue of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service.

But videos (especially lengthy ones) are always a bit of a pain to reference, and these are incredibly significant documents, so we thought it’d be quite useful to post the full transcripts too, with the text tidied up (taking out all the “um”s and “eh”s and so on) for ease of reading.

This is the interview with Stuart Houston (John Logue’s is here):

And below is what’s said in it. We’ve added a comment here and there, in red.

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I’ve just recorded an episode of the BBC ScotCast podcast, which should “drop”, as we say in the media biz, around teatime tonight. It focused largely on issues around Operation Branchform, and the fact that only one of the two crimes it concerned has been resolved.

Time always flies when you’re having fun, so I ended up not being able to fit in half the stuff I wanted to say in the 40 minutes I chatted with Martin Geissler (which will likely shrink to fit into the 30-minute broadcast slot by the time they’ve edited all the most libellous bits out).

And one of those things was the bewildering fact that the investigation into the SNP’s finances went on for two years before the police stumbled into the second crime, and the only one that’s actually concluded – Peter Murrell’s embezzlement from the SNP. Because the first crime ought to have been all  but done and dusted in 24 hours max.

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Alert readers will have found it hard not to notice that Wings is currently focused on trying to solve one mystery above all others: why nobody has been prosecuted for a massive theft of hundreds of thousands of pounds, which took place in open sight, beyond any dispute, and is openly admitted by someone who was there at the time.

Until this week, nobody in the two organisations responsible for criminal prosecutions in the country – Police Scotland and the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (the Crown Office or COPFS for short) had issued any sort of explanation of why the original Operation Branchform investigation apparently fell by the wayside when it led police to discover a second crime: that of embezzlement against the SNP by its then-Chief Executive, Peter Murrell.

But this week, with very little fanfare, the BBC quietly put out two extended interviews with senior representatives of those organisations, seemingly the unused footage from their half-hour televised documentary “Peter Murrell: The Man With The Money”.

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This is the letter the SNP sent donors to the ringfenced 2017 fundraiser.

The terms are right there in the first sentence, and repeated several more times. The money will be “ring fenced for a future referendum”. It’s to “build up a sizeable war chest to fight the campaign when the time comes”. It’s to “ensure we are not outspent in the referendum campaign”.

There is no ambiguity in the email. There’s no mention of the SNP anywhere except in Jim Henderson’s email address. No suggestion whatsoever that the money could be used by the SNP for anything but a referendum campaign.

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These are the people whose job it was to stop the leadership of the SNP from stealing almost £700,000 of “ringfenced” fundraiser money from independence supporters, and who utterly failed at that job.

It was also their job to stop Peter Murrell stealing the best part of £500,000 from the SNP, in a separate but related crime, and they failed at that one too.

A small handful of them (marked with red asterisks, but see postscript below) tried their best to do their duties, and were blocked primarily by one powerful woman – Nicola Sturgeon – and a room full of cowards, weaklings and bullies, listed above.

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This really isn’t going to go away.

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

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Nobody’s beating this tweet today.

But as Peter Murrell begins a five-years-and-three-months prison sentence – more than we were expecting, in truth – let’s not lose sight of the key fact that the theft of hundreds of thousands of pounds of independence supporters’ money by the SNP, which accidentally exposed Murrell’s entirely separate crime of theft FROM the SNP, has still not been answered for by anyone.

Be assured, readers, that Wings won’t rest until it is.