Wings Over Scotland | For Me, But Not For Thee

Huh.

Well, that’s nice, isn’t it?

The SNP are hoping to make out like bandits from Peter Murrell’s conviction.

Despite Swinney’s admission yesterday that the party stole £700,000 from donors to two “ring-fenced” fundraisers, it stands to pocket a surprise bonus of £400,000 from recovering his criminal proceeds (on top of Swinney’s boasted “significant increase” in donations from gullible idiot members since Murrell’s conviction).

It is not currently known whether that will include the retrieval from Nicola Sturgeon of the gifts Murrell bought her with embezzled money – a suggestion Sturgeon was mortified by in her Laura Kuenssberg interview on Sunday.

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But keeping goods you know were bought with stolen money is a crime in Scotland, whether or not you knew at the time you received them.

It seems clear from the above clip that Sturgeon has not “immediately take[n] steps to hand the property over to the police”, and has no apparent intention of doing so.

Murrell’s lawyer told the court this week that his client “had enough funds to repay the sum he embezzled from the party”.

That’s an extremely interesting revelation in itself, in several ways. For one, we don’t know whether it means only the £400,000 he was convicted for, or also the extra £60,000 that the Crown dropped from the charge sheet in his plea deal.

The former case would create an extraordinary situation where the SNP was being paid back for stuff Murrell stole for himself, but not for stuff he stole for Sturgeon.

The second startling thing is that since no recovery process has yet begun and nothing has been sold, the lawyer’s statement means that Murrell must CURRENTLY have at least £400,000 in liquid funds, despite having a take-home pay of only around £57,000 during his time as CEO and having lent £107,000 to the SNP. That’s quite a feat of squirrelling. (And also means he’ll still be quite wealthy when he comes out of prison.)

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So the SNP plans to keep everything that rightfully belongs to it and its members, but also to keep everything that doesn’t, including donations that were solicited and obtained from members of other parties EXPRESSLY because they were NOT to be used for everyday SNP operations.

And seemingly means to let Nicola Sturgeon enjoy the fruits of Murrell’s theft to boot.

We can therefore forgive anyone who treats John Swinney’s assertions in his email to members today – that the party is a new, reformed moral entity that conducts itself with the greatest moral probity and is now above all suspicion – with extreme scepticism.

Under “Honest John” Swinney the SNP appears to be the same unprincipled, grasping, crooked, cynical and greedy bunch of shysters and snakes that it’s been since 2015, and the slow-learning cretins still throwing their money at it thoroughly deserve to – and doubtless will – be robbed again.