Peter Murrell jailed for embezzling £400,000 from SNP funds

Peter Murrell’s prison sentence turned a party finance scandal into a test of institutional trust inside the SNP. The party’s former chief executive was jailed at the High Court in Edinburgh for five years and three months after admitting he embezzled more than £400,000 from party funds over 12 years.

Murrell pleaded guilty on May 25, 2026, to stealing money between August 2010 and October 2022. Court summaries put the total at £400,310.65, and the sentence was backdated to the date he was remanded in custody. Lord Young described the conduct as a “calculated crime of dishonesty”, reflecting the scale and persistence of the fraud across a long period of internal party control.

The purchases linked to the money stripped from SNP accounts show how deeply the abuse ran through basic financial oversight. Among the items cited were a motorhome, a Jaguar and other cars, a £1,200 space telescope, a robotic lawnmower, designer salt and pepper shakers, three designer manicure sets, two toilet seats, a coffee machine, a bread bin, toiletries, kitchenware and luxury goods. The sheer variety of the spending has sharpened questions about how such transactions passed through a party that has long argued it could be trusted to govern Scotland responsibly.

Murrell’s fall matters far beyond one criminal case because of the role he played in the SNP’s machinery. He served as chief executive from 2001 until 2023, making him one of the most influential figures in the party for more than two decades and a central backroom operator during Nicola Sturgeon’s rise to first minister. The scandal has intensified scrutiny of the SNP’s internal controls, its leadership culture and the gap between its public claims of competence and the private reality exposed by Operation Branchform.

Police Scotland said Murrell had occupied “a significant position of privilege and power” in public life in Scotland, while assistant chief constable Stuart Houston said the investigation had been “lengthy and extremely complex”. The case also remains politically sensitive because police inquiries did not end with Murrell. In 2026, reports said a file had been sent to the Crown Office in August 2024 seeking advice on whether further inquiries were needed in relation to Sturgeon and former SNP treasurer Colin Beattie.

The personal and political damage has been compounding for months. Nicola Sturgeon announced in January 2025 that the couple had split, and John Swinney said on the day of Murrell’s guilty plea that the SNP itself was a victim of his actions. Murrell’s sentencing has now fixed that breach of trust in criminal terms, leaving the party to answer a harder question: how so much money could disappear from inside one of the UK’s most powerful political machines.