EDINBURGH — The moment Peter Murrell was led from the Edinburgh High Court in handcuffs on Monday, wearing a dark blue suit and black tie, the Scottish National Party’s long reckoning with its own finances arrived at a point no internal audit could have prepared it for. For 22 years, Murrell had run the party. For at least 12 of them, the prosecution now says, he was stealing from it.
The former SNP chief executive pleaded guilty on May 25 to embezzling £400,310.65 from the party between August 2010 and October 2022 — a sum roughly equivalent to what the SNP would spend on a significant national campaign. In a deal brokered with prosecutors over several weeks, the original charge was reduced by nearly £60,000, but the admitted facts were devastating enough. Murrell had submitted false invoices. He had used the party’s credit cards for personal purchases. He had falsified the SNP’s own accounts to disguise what he was doing.
Judge James Young told the court that Murrell was responsible for a “gross breach of trust” and declined to grant bail. Murrell will appear again on June 2, when the full details of his crimes are to be laid before the court. Sentencing is set for June 23. He faces a lengthy prison term.
The 119-page indictment that accompanied his plea listed the breadth of what he bought: a £124,550 motorhome, a Jaguar I-Pace worth £81,000 in which SNP funds covered £57,500 of the purchase, a Volkswagen Golf, Kindles, telescopes, gardening equipment, luxury goods from Harrods and the Royal Mint, cosmetics from Estée Lauder, items from John Lewis. Police Scotland’s Assistant Chief Constable Stuart Houston said Murrell had shown “utter contempt for the high public trust placed in him” and had diverted public donations to “bankroll the lavish lifestyle he craved but could not afford.”
The case originated in Operation Branchform, a Police Scotland investigation launched in 2021 into the spending of more than £600,000 in SNP donations intended to fund a future Scottish independence referendum. Murrell was first arrested in April 2023, when officers searched the home he shared with his then-wife, former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, near Glasgow. Sturgeon was herself arrested and questioned for seven hours in June 2023, before being released without charge. She was formally cleared last year. The couple separated in January 2025.
In an Instagram statement published on the day of his plea, Sturgeon said she had “no knowledge or suspicion whatsoever” of what Murrell had done with party money. “To be deceived and let down by a husband I loved and trusted has caused me acute pain,” she wrote. “These are not my crimes.” She added that she had been “misled just as others were” — a formulation that places her in the same category as the rank-and-file SNP members who donated the money Murrell spent at Harrods.
Current SNP leader and First Minister John Swinney, who retained power after the party’s victory in May’s Holyrood election, held a press conference at the Edinburgh Marriott Hotel shortly after the plea. “I am betrayed,” Swinney said, his voice measured but his language deliberate. “By embezzling from the SNP, Peter Murrell was stealing the hopes, the dreams and the aspirations of thousands of people all over Scotland.” It is the kind of statement designed to draw a clean line between the Swinney-era party and the period of Murrell’s stewardship — though how convincingly that line holds will depend on what the June 2 hearing reveals about the mechanisms of the fraud and how many people around Murrell could have seen what he was doing.
That question is not yet answered. The full account of how Murrell constructed his false invoicing operation, and how it evaded detection across three SNP leaders and multiple internal finance teams over more than a decade, will not be publicly disclosed until Tuesday. What is already clear is that the method was not crude. Prosecutors’ descriptions of falsified party accounts and systematic use of the organization’s credit cards suggest a scheme that required ongoing active maintenance — not a one-time lapse of judgment.
As Reuters reported, Murrell admitted diverting funds to buy items including cars, a motorhome and luxury goods. The plea deal reduced the charged sum from the original £459,000 cited in the indictment. Under Scottish criminal procedure, the terms of the reduction will be detailed at sentencing.
For the SNP, the timing is uncomfortable in a particular way. The party won the May 2026 Scottish Parliament election — Swinney’s mandate is fresh, the independence cause is again being pressed. But the Murrell case now returns to court on June 2, and then again on June 23, pulling the party back into the scandal even as it seeks to project forward momentum. As Al Jazeera noted, Scottish Conservative and Labour politicians have already called for a fuller public accounting of how the fraud was possible and whether any other party figures bear responsibility for the oversight failures that allowed it to continue for so long.
Murrell’s legal team made no public statement after the plea. What his counsel will offer in mitigation on June 23 is unknown. Whether the court will hear that the motorhome was a shared asset, that the Jaguar was partly his own money, or that the falsified invoices were buried deep enough in the SNP’s bookkeeping that even a determined accountant might have missed them — none of that is on the record yet. What is on the record is that he admitted it, that he did it for 12 years, and that he walked out of the Edinburgh High Court in handcuffs.
