Thread by @staylorish

1/ Something very important is being missed in the Peter Murrell coverage. And it explains why Murrell was able to carry on the embezzlement long after he should have been stopped. And why John Swinney cannot hide behind the “victim of criminality” defence.🧵

2/ There are really two different stories about SNP finances which have ended up becoming unhelpfully conflated. The first story is about the crowdfunder money, which was supposed to be ringfenced for a future referendum campaign.

3/ The total amount of donations supposed to have been ringfenced ended up being £667k, according to a statement by Colin Beattie in June 2021. We know from contemporaneous reporting that the vast majority of this (£482k) was raised in the first half of 2017.

4/ And we also know what happened to that £482k. Because before anyone realised this was going to become a scandal, the SNP admitted that the money had been spent on the 2017 general election campaign.

https://twitter.com/staylorish/status/1648612185432629248

5/ The publication (on 21st August 2018) of the 2017 accounts confirmed this narrative. The accounts showed just £8k of cash in the bank, despite £482k having been raised and (supposedly) ringfenced in the first half of the year.

6/ This didn’t get much attention until @WingsScotland wrote about the SNP’s parlous financial situation in January 2020, and noted that the ringfenced crowdfunder money was missing. wingsoverscotland.com/the-betrayer/

7/ At this point, Nicola Sturgeon, John Swinney, and all senior SNP people got behind a cover-up operation. They must have known the ringfenced money was raided to pay for the 2017 general election. But now that Wings was making a fuss, they decided to pretend it hadn’t happened.

8/ This is why Nicola Sturgeon and John Swinney went on TV in 2021 to deny that any money was missing at all. They both knew it was missing, and were clearly lying. But at this stage, they thought they were lying about run-of-the-mill dishonesty surrounding the crowdfunder money.

9/ Now, let’s turn to the second story: Peter Murrell’s embezzlement. The year by year evolution of his embezzlements looks like this:

10/ Several things are notable. Murrell’s criminality was pretty small scale until he really started to accelerate the looting in 2016. Importantly, this was *before* the first of the indyref2 crowdfunders was launched in March 2017.

11/ The majority of the embezzlement happened from 2019 onwards. In other words: the majority happened *after* the disappearance of the bulk of the crowdfunder money was fully public information from the August 2018 publication of the 2017 accounts.

12/ Almost half of the embezzlement happened from 2020 onwards. In other words: almost half happened *after* Wings had first raised questions about where the crowdfunder money had gone.

13/ This timeline explains why Murrell was able to continue the embezzlement for so long. Sturgeon, Swinney, and numerous other senior SNP figures were trying to cover up run-of-the-mill dishonesty, and this allowed criminal dishonesty to continue (and to accelerate) unchecked.

14/ And this is why Swinney’s “victim of criminality” line will not wash. The criminality was able to happen because Sturgeon and Swinney lied about the money having gone missing. By saying “nothing to see here”, both Sturgeon and Swinney facilitated Murrell’s criminal behaviour.