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The luxury motorhome that Peter Murrell bought using money stolen from the Scottish National party was driven for only four miles, sitting unused for more than two years.
Murrell, then the SNP’s chief executive, drove the £124,550 Niesmann+Bischoff vehicle from the dealers at Halbeath in Fife in January 2021 to his mother’s home in Dunfermline – a cost of £31,138 a mile.
The high court in Edinburgh heard on Tuesday that Murrell then lied about what it was in the party’s records, describing it as a van in a faked invoice, and proceeded to stock it up with hundreds of pounds worth of luxury goods.
The police found Le Creuset and Joseph Joseph kitchenware, an Alessi teapot and toiletries from Molton Brown. Murrell also embezzled SNP funds, chiefly from party donations, membership fees and bequests, to buy motoring guides for “inspirational journeys” around Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland.
In a short statement detailing how Murrell lied and falsified paperwork in order to steal a total of £400,310.65 from the SNP, Alan Campbell KC, for the prosecution, said the vehicle stayed there until it was seized by police in April 2023.
Murrell, the estranged husband of the former first minister and SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon, sat impassively in the dock wearing a dark blue suit and black tie as Campbell spoke, before being led out in handcuffs to return to the remand wing of Edinburgh prison.
Murrell pleaded guilty last week to embezzling the money over a 12-year period. For many, the motorhome has become symbolic of Murrell’s greed but raised fresh questions about how much Sturgeon knew.
In a highly charged 55-minute BBC interview with Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday, Sturgeon denied she had ever noticed the vehicle when she visited her mother-in-law’s home with Murrell.
She said it was parked beside the house, next to a neighbouring property, and implied it was never mentioned by either Murrell or his mother or father.
The motorhome was “between the house and the next-door neighbour’s house. I genuinely have no conscious memory of seeing that motorhome. If I saw it, I would probably have assumed it was the neighbour’s,”, Sturgeon said.
“My mother- and father-in-law were in their mid-80s. It wouldn’t have crossed my mind that it was theirs … and why would it have crossed my mind it was the SNP’s, that Peter had bought it?”
Campbell told the judge, Lord Young, that Murrell withheld it from party staff too. “It was never used or seen by any other party member or employee,” he said.
He claimed to staff the motorhome was bought because it could be used as a mobile campaign headquarters during the Covid crisis. When the police searched it, no SNP campaign material was found.
Campbell said that as party chief executive, Murrell had complete control of its books and accounts, and used that access to disguise his purchases throughout this 12-year spending spree.
He created false invoices, used the wrong codes for some items in the party’s books, transferred money directly out of the party’s accounts and used his SNP charge card and those of two SNP employees, without their knowledge, to buy things.
Many of the mail order goods, including from Amazon, were delivered directly to SNP headquarters, with a few posted to family members.
Those fraudulent transactions included:
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A hand-chased silver wine coaster from Hamilton & Inches worth £3,500 which was described as spending on “leadership expenses”.
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A £23 egg poacher was listed in SNP records as “computer hardware purchases – internet cabling”
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An £81,000 Jaguar I-Pace SUV was identified as “stage payment” in a fake invoice.
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The £3,070 cost of a robotic Husqvarna lawnmower, found by police at the home he then shared with Sturgeon, was listed as “legal fees”.
Analysis of Murrell’s spending has shown that after he made a trickle of purchases between 2010 and 2015, his embezzlement reached nearly £50,000 a year in 2016 and 2017. It then rose to nearly £100,000 in 2019 before peaking at £150,000 in 2020, largely due to the motorhome.
Murrell is expected to be sentenced on 23 June, and faces imprisonment.
