Cherry calls for inquiry into £400,000 embezzlement — Bbc Scotland News
Joanna Cherry has called for a properly independent inquiry into how former SNP chief executive Peter Murrell was able to embezzle more than £400,000, saying the party’s financial scrutiny was frustrated for years. The former SNP MP said scotland news should examine why questions about the party’s finances were blocked.
Cherry said the issue reached beyond Murrell’s crime. She argued that Nicola Sturgeon and other members of the SNP’s national executive committee faced questions over how concerns about party money were handled, while Sturgeon said she had no knowledge or suspicion whatsoever about Murrell’s crime.
Cherry’s 2019 concerns
Cherry first raised concerns in 2019 over money donated to a ring-fenced fund set up by the SNP for a second independence referendum. She said the fund amounted to about £600,000 and appeared to have been spent on other things. That dispute has now returned to the fore because Murrell admitted embezzling more than £400,000.
Cherry said she and a number of colleagues stood for election to senior SNP positions on a manifesto of getting to the bottom of what had happened to that money and improving the party’s internal governance. She resigned from the SNP’s ruling body in 2021 because of concerns about transparency.
Murrell and the SNP books
Cherry said colleagues on the finance and audit committee found that Murrell was refusing to show them the books. She also said questions asked by the national executive committee were met with a brick wall. In her account, the problem was not a single unanswered question but the party’s failure to let its own scrutiny bodies examine the records they needed.
Murrell’s conduct now sits alongside the wider finance inquiry that brought Sturgeon into the police investigation into SNP finances. She was arrested during that investigation and later told she would face no further action.
Sturgeon and party scrutiny
Cherry also linked the finance dispute to her own treatment inside the party. She was sacked from the SNP’s frontbench team at Westminster in 2021 for unacceptable behaviour, and said some of the reason for that dismissal related to her questions about party finances. She told the that Sturgeon had shown a remarkable lack of curiosity over those concerns.
“I would like to see a properly independent inquiry into how this was allowed to happen and in particular into why the efforts of those of us who were elected to get to the bottom of the party's governance and financial mismanagement were frustrated from doing so, and frustrated from doing so in pretty unpleasant circumstances.”
Cherry added: “It wasn't just that we didn't get an answer to our questions - we were demonised for asking the questions and one by one we all resigned from the national executive committee.”
Her call leaves the party’s internal handling of the fund and the scrutiny around it at the centre of the story. The unresolved issue is not just Murrell’s embezzlement, but whether anyone inside the SNP can account for how concerns about the money were handled when they were first raised.
