Former SNP chief executive admits embezzling more than £400,000

Peter Murrell’s guilty plea turned the SNP’s long-running finance scandal into a sharper reckoning over trust, control and political responsibility. The party’s former chief executive admitted at Edinburgh High Court that he embezzled more than £400,000 from party funds over a 12-year period.

Murrell, 60, admitted diverting money between August 2010 and October 2022, using it for purchases that included cars, a motorhome and luxury goods. He was remanded in custody after the plea and is due to be sentenced on 23 June 2026. The amount admitted in court was reported as £400,310.65.

The case sits inside Police Scotland’s Operation Branchform, the investigation launched in July 2021 into how SNP money raised for independence campaigning was handled. That inquiry initially centred on about £666,953 collected for the cause, and it has since become one of the most damaging probes ever to engulf a governing party in Scotland.

Murrell’s path through the scandal has been long and politically corrosive. He resigned as SNP chief executive in March 2023 after a row over misleading membership figures, was arrested the following month and charged in May 2024. His plea now places a final criminal acknowledgment on a case that has spent years hanging over the party’s internal culture and financial governance.

The fallout has reached far beyond Murrell himself. The investigation drew in his estranged wife, former first minister Nicola Sturgeon, who was questioned and later cleared in the wider inquiry. It also fuelled public questions about what senior SNP figures knew, when they knew it and how a party that relied on donations from members and supporters allowed such a prolonged failure of oversight.

For the SNP, the damage is not only financial. Murrell spent more than 20 years as chief executive, giving him unusual influence over the machinery of the party while it was at the centre of Scotland’s constitutional debate. His guilty plea has intensified pressure for a full accounting of internal controls, donor trust and the decision-making culture around a party already under strain.

Police and prosecutors have treated the case as a serious breach of trust involving funds given by people who believed they were backing a political campaign. Murrell’s sentence will close one chapter of the case, but the longer political cost for the SNP is likely to linger well beyond the courtroom.