Wings Over Scotland | A Long Hard Think

More than three months ago now, we sent Police Scotland a Freedom Of Information request. A few minutes ago we finally received a response. Brace yourselves.

That is, um… interesting.

Retaining gifts you know were bought with embezzled money is the common-law crime of reset in Scots law, under the Criminal Law (Consolidation) (Scotland) Act 1995.

There used to be an exception whereby a wife could not be found guilty of reset in respect of items given to her by her husband, but it was abolished by the Marriage and Civil Partnership (Scotland) Act 2014.

So the numerous high-value items which we know Nicola Sturgeon was given by Peter Murrell and paid for with embezzled money are legally the proceeds of crime, and must be handed over as soon as the recipient becomes aware of their provenance.

It is, to the best of our knowledge, still the police’s job to investigate crimes and the crime of reset is unarguably being committed here. Sturgeon knows how Murrell came about the items, but has publicly stated that she has no intention of returning them, telling Laura Kuenssberg in May this year that:

“There will now be, I would imagine, a legal process to recover the money from Peter that he embezzled from the SNP […] I am not guilty of that embezzlement, so nothing that belongs to me should be part of that.”

?

It is somewhat staggering, then, that Police Scotland not only have no knowledge of whether any of the items have been returned, but also have no knowledge of whether they’re intending to investigate the crime, or to just turn a blind eye to it as they’ve done with the original missing £700,000.

We’ll be honest with you, readers, we’re at something of a loss for words at this point. It genuinely does not appear to be at all clear whether the laws of Scotland apply to Nicola Sturgeon or not. We’re going to have to contemplate how to respond to that for a little bit. All we can say for now is, she must REALLY love those fancy pens.