A FORMER Labour first minister has called for a joint inquiry between Holyrood and Westminster into Peter Murrell’s embezzlement of SNP funds.
Jack McConnell – now a peer in the Lords and a UK Government adviser – said the House of Commons’ Public Accounts Committee should hold a probe with the equivalent Scottish Parliament committee.
Murrell – the estranged husband of former first minister Nicola Sturgeon – last week pleaded guilty at the High Court in Edinburgh to embezzling £400,310.65 from the SNP between 2010 and 2022.
McConnell, who was Scottish Labour leader and first minister between 2001 and 2007, made his comments after Sturgeon spoke to the BBC on Sunday for her first broadcast interview since Murrell pleaded guilty.
Speaking to the BBC on Monday morning, McConnell said that an inquiry should not “go back over police matters or, for that matter, the personal lives of Nicola Sturgeon and Peter Murrell”.
“I think, however, there are real public interest issues here that need to be looked at, with a view to improving future governance of political parties and perhaps also the governance of Scotland,” he went on.
“Three examples I would give. There are real suspicions that the Crown Office were far too close to senior politicians and briefing them ahead of police announcements …
“There are real issues, also, I think about the questions in relation to public funding of political parties. In this case, the Scottish National Party – who received millions of pounds because they were the third largest party at Westminster over the past decade – where that money went and was any of it involved in the scandal, I think is a genuine issue to be investigated.
“And I think also there are issues about small donors to political movements.
There are a lot of rules and regulations in place now about large donations to political parties, and that's mainly to protect the public and governments from undue influence from large donors.
“But there are really no safeguards in place for the thousands of people who sometimes make a small donation to a political party.”
First Minister John Swinney has so far rejected calls for a Holyrood inquiry into the embezzlement, which has led Westminster’s Scottish Affairs Committee to consider its own probe, which eight of the 11 members support.
The Scottish Affairs Committee is made up of almost all Scottish MPs. The SNP has just one of the 11 places, with six Labour members, two Tories and two Lib Dems.
There is only one Scottish MP on the Commons’ Public Accounts Committee – Labour’s Chris Kane.
On Sunday, Sturgeon told the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg that she felt "as if I'm serving a sentence for a crime I did not commit".
"[Murrell] perpetrated a crime on the SNP. By definition, that included me as the party leader. He misled. He deceived," Sturgeon said.
