Former SNP CEO Peter Murrell’s embezzlement of more than £400,000 from the Scottish National Party is, on one level, a story of personal dishonesty. The former SNP chief executive and ex-husband of Scotland’s longest-serving First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has admitted stealing party funds over a 12-year period and has been sentenced to five years and three months in prison.
But despite the clear political aspects of the case, at its heart, this is a story of a massive yet all too familiar compliance failure at the top of a nationally significant organisation, and a party in charge of Scotland’s £68 billion annual budget. The resulting reputational damage, let alone the criminal aspect, has been serious and significant. So much so that some political commentators wondered if, had the details been revealed prior to the May Scottish Parliamentary election, would the SNP have been able to secure another term?
Murrell’s offending was brazen, long-running and strangely banal. The headline purchases are extraordinary enough, starting with a £124,550 motorhome that Nicola Sturgeon claimed to “have no conscious memory” of seeing despite it being parked at her mother-in-law’s home. Other purchases Murrell made included a Jaguar I-PACE (£81,277), a Volkswagen Golf (£32,989, including £16,489 paid from SNP funds), two Bremont luxury watches (£9,350.25), Montblanc goods (£24,342.60), Smythson stationery and leather goods (£24,495.50), high-end coffee machines (£8,991.65), Dyson products (£6,085.86), Le Creuset cookware (£5,319.28), Lalique salt and pepper grinders (£2,618.16), Jo Malone candles and reed diffusers (£1,056), and a robotic lawnmower (£3,070).
The smaller details are almost more revealing. Party funds were used for cleaning products, batteries, kitchenware, games consoles, DVDs, hand cream, a parking ticket and an OXO egg poacher set. The prosecution records that the egg poacher was coded in the accounting system as “computer hardware purchases” and described as “Ethernet cabling”. Two Bremont watches worth more than £9,000 were recorded as “event merchandise”. A robotic lawnmower installed at Murrell’s home was recorded as legal fees.
That is what makes the case so useful for compliance. Embezzlement on such a scale rarely announces itself as fraud. It appears as a vague accounting description wrapped up in a senior person’s explanation. It’s pushed through as an exception to a process or dismissed as a missing invoice, an asset no one has seen, or a line item that nobody wants to question.
The facts of the case
Peter Murrell was chief executive of the SNP from 2001 until March 2023. He was effectively in charge of the administrative side of the party. His wife, Nicola Sturgeon, was deputy leader of the party from 2004 to 2014, and leader of the party and First Minister of Scotland from 2014 to 2023. From August 2010 until October 2022, Peter Murrell misused £400,310.65 of party funds. The money came from the SNP’s principal bank account, funded mainly by membership fees, donations and legacies.
He was able to make direct transfers from that account. He also had a party charge card in his own name, and used charge cards belonging to two other staff members without their knowledge. Over more than 12 years, he made 383 Amazon purchases using party cards, spending £42,660.74 on items that were not for party purposes. He made a further 238 purchases from other retailers, spending £139,971.
Many of these purchases were delivered to his home address or to SNP headquarters. From April 2020, almost all of the Amazon purchases were delivered to his home. From March 2020, all purchases from other retailers were delivered to his home.
The largest and most notorious purchase was the motorhome. Murrell ordered a Niesmann and Bischoff Smove 7.4e motorhome in October 2020. He paid a £12,500 deposit using his SNP charge card, then paid the £112,050 balance by four direct transfers from the SNP account. The motorhome was delivered in January 2021, driven to his mother’s home in Dunfermline and seized by police in April 2023. The odometer showed it had been driven only four miles.
Murrell’s explanation was that the vehicle could have been used for campaigning. The evidence pointed elsewhere. It was not branded. It contained no SNP campaign material. It was insured only for Murrell to drive for social, domestic and pleasure purposes. It contained Le Creuset and Joseph Joseph kitchen implements, an Alessi teapot and Molton Brown toiletries. The day after he ordered it, Murrell bought three guides to inspirational motorhome journeys around Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland.
Murrell bought an £81,277 Jaguar I-PACE in 2019. The balance of £57,500 was paid from the SNP account through two direct transfers. He later sold the vehicle and personally received £47,378.76.
These purchases were made through false invoices and misleading accounting entries. The Jaguar invoice was altered so the dealership name changed from Pentland Jaguar East to Pentland Motor Company Ltd, the customer address became SNP headquarters rather than Murrell’s home, and the item was described as a “stage payment”. When queried in an audit, Murrell said the payment related to staging for SNP events and a planned national tour that had been postponed.
The motorhome invoice was also altered. The customer address was changed to SNP headquarters, the account name became “SNP – Murrell”, and the vehicle was described as a van rather than a motorhome. Details of optional extras, including security, tracking, navigation systems and a television, were removed.
How did the SNP let this happen?
The obvious question is how this could continue for so long for an organisation that includes dozens of employees, over 50,000 members and income of nearly £5 million per year. The SNP had accounting software, expense processes and auditors. It also had a fixed asset register and corporate charge cards. The problem is that too many of those systems appear to have relied on Murrell’s own authority as CEO, and were accepted without question by the party machine.
One critical issue was a centralisation of control. Murrell could make direct bank transfers, use his own party charge card, use other staff members’ cards, approve expenses, access the accounting system and influence how transactions were described. That is a textbook breach of segregation of duties. The person who created the risk was also able to shape the evidence trail.
Given the political nature of the organisation and Murrell’s connection to the party leadership, there was also the issue of senior-person exceptionalism. As CEO, Murrell had ultimate approval of expenses, including his own. He said he could not access the electronic expenses portal, which meant he was able to submit claims without necessarily providing receipts or invoices. In a healthy control environment, senior executives face more scrutiny, not less. The SNP appears to have had the opposite problem: the more senior the person, the harder the challenge.
Another critical failure was a lack of accounting validation. Accounting codes became camouflage. “Event merchandise”, “computer hardware”, “legal fees”, “leadership expenses”, “transport” and “stage payment” were labels that concealed personal spending. A functioning finance process would test whether the code matched the supplier, item, invoice, delivery address, asset register and business purpose.
While the motorhome was eventually added to the party’s fixed asset register after the auditor raised a query, the vehicle was never used or seen by any party member or employee, was insured for his personal use and had only been driven four miles. A fixed asset register is not a control if no one checks where the asset is, who uses it, whether the organisation owns it, and whether it is being used for organisational purposes.
There was also an inadequate challenge of implausible explanations. A personal Jaguar was described as staging. A motorhome was described as a campaign vehicle. A robotic lawnmower became legal fees. A silver wine coaster became leadership expenses. These explanations were implausible. The governance failure is that they appear to have survived for years, until a police investigation: Operation Branchform, was finally launched in July 2021 and Nicola Sturgeon unexpectedly resigned in March 2023, before her arrest in June.
What did other senior figures know?
There is no finding that Nicola Sturgeon knew about Murrell’s offending. She denies any knowledge or suspicion that personal items had been bought with SNP funds. She was arrested during Operation Branchform, later faced no further police action, and has said she was deceived by Murrell.
But compliance is not only about what can be proved in a criminal court. It is also about what responsible people should have asked, escalated or challenged. That is where the case becomes uncomfortable for the SNP and reaches into reputational damage. Murrell was not a distant employee hidden in a regional office. Some items bought with embezzled funds were reportedly visible in Sturgeon’s domestic or public life. She was photographed wearing a £425 pendant bought by Murrell with party funds. Fitted bookshelves and a library ladder, also purchased with embezzled money, are believed to have appeared in the background of interviews.
In 2021, three SNP officials: Edinburgh Lord Provost Frank Ross, Allison Graham and Cynthia Guthrie, resigned from the party’s finance and audit committee after being denied sight of the accounts. They allegedly complained about a lack of transparency in the party’s finances. However in 2023, Nicola Sturgeon told the party’s governing body that the finances “have never been stronger.” Moreover, it is alleged she warned the party’s income from donations could be threatened if concerns about financial propriety were made public.
More resignations followed throughout 2021 and 2022, including the national treasurer Douglas Chapman MP, and Joanna Cherry MP KC, both citing transparency as a key concern, despite then Deputy First Minister (and now current FM) John Swinney citing “no knowledge” of why the officials quit.
While this does not prove criminal knowledge by wider officials, it does make the “nobody knew” position harder as a matter of corporate governance. The critical question for any compliance failure is not simply whether other leaders were complicit but whether the culture made it too easy not to ask.
Did office holders know or did they not want to know? Did they assume that a chief executive’s explanation was enough? Clearly personal relationships made challenges awkward. Beyond that, the party’s political dominance potentially discouraged scrutiny, and some like former finance and audit committee member Cynthia Guthrie joined a rival political party led by the late Alex Salmond. Nevertheless, when national treasurer Douglas Chapman resigns and says “he has not received the support of financial information required to carry out the fiduciary duties,” there are clearly some questions that are not being answered.
Did the SNP fail to prevent fraud?
Under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023, large UK organisations can be criminally liable for failing to prevent fraud. The offence came into force in September 2025, so it does not apply retrospectively to Murrell’s offending. There is also a second major caveat: the offence is focused on fraud intended to benefit the organisation or its clients. In the Murrell case, the SNP appears to have been the victim, not the beneficiary.
That means the case is not a clean hypothetical prosecution under ECCTA. If an employee falsifies sales figures to win business for a company, or misleads investors to benefit the organisation, failure to prevent fraud is squarely engaged. If an employee steals from the organisation itself, the organisation may have suffered a fraud rather than benefited from one.
Yet the case still shows precisely what prosecutors and auditors will examine when they assess whether an organisation had reasonable procedures to prevent fraud. A serious prevention framework starts by identifying where fraud could arise, particularly in finance, expenses, procurement, card payments, asset purchases and senior management transactions. Significant bank transfers should require dual authorisation. Senior executives should not approve their own expenses. Missing receipts should trigger escalation, not informal workarounds. Luxury suppliers, home deliveries and mismatches between accounting codes and actual purchases should be flagged and reviewed. Major assets should be independently verified, and staff should have a speak-up route that bypasses the chief executive. Audit queries should be closed only when supported by evidence, not simply because a senior person has offered an explanation. And, if a groundswell of senior officials cite concerns over transparency, those should be investigated.
The statutory defence under failure to prevent fraud is having reasonable procedures in place. Reasonable does not mean perfect. It means proportionate, documented, embedded and tested, and ones that can actually catch wrongdoing. On the Murrell facts, the hard question is why so many warning signs were ignored for so long.
The SNP case shines a light on fraud under ECCTA. While the failure to prevent fraud offence may not have applied because the party was the intended victim, the case illustrates the exact governance weaknesses the offence is designed to make organisations confront: senior insider risk, poor segregation of duties, weak expense controls, ineffective monitoring and a culture that failed to challenge the person at the top.
It’s unclear what procedures, if any, the SNP had in place to prevent fraud. From policies to training, it’s clear the SNP operated without a compliance culture for too long. From false invoices to unanswered questions, fraud prevention fails when one person can control the money, the records and the explanation. If an organisation’s defence is that nobody knew, the next question is whether anyone was properly looking.
