Time for answers on the SNP investigation

For more than two and a half years a team of detectives and lawyers have been working on one of Scotland’s most significant investigations, apparently from an £80million state of the art “crime campus” outside Glasgow.

They are seeking an answer to Scotland’s long running mystery, investigating potential embezzlement or fraud, as well as what happened to over £600,000 donated by SNP members to pay for a second referendum on independence. That vote hasn’t happened but the cash seems to have gone missing.

Investigators from Police Scotland, advised by colleagues from the National Crime Agency, are understood to have been based at a brand new crime-fighting facility at Gartcosh in Lanarkshire. But as to what stage Operation Branchform has reached after more than 30 months – and with the taxpayers’ bill now totalling over one million pounds – the public knows very little.

There are only the words of Sir Iain Livingstone, the former chief constable who retired last summer, and who accepted in an interview with the Today programme in July that the probe had moved beyond seeking to find out what happened to the missing SNP cash. He said, notably, that “investigations around fraud or potential embezzlement or the misuse of funds take time”.

That is the sum of the public’s knowledge thus far in a case that has seen the former first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, her husband, former SNP chief executive Peter Murrell, and the SNP treasurer arrested as suspects and subsequently released pending further enquiries. Ms Sturgeon has denied any wrongdoing. She is presumably busy writing her memoirs, for which she’s received a substantial advance, and she is still a member of the Scottish Parliament. Meanwhile Mr Murrell is seldom seen in public.

We’ve been treated to some astonishing scenes thanks to the actions of Scottish police in the past two years, such as their decision to erect a forensic tent in front of the Sturgeon/murrell home in Glasgow. And then there was the discovery of a luxury motorhome at the Fife address of Mr Murrell’s mother.

There were also suggestions that Mr Murrell had briefly been in possession of a luxury car. Yet even these developments haven’t told us much, if anything, about the progress of the police inquiry.

Total silence has reigned from both Police Scotland, which from October onwards has had a new chief constable, and from the Crown Office, which is Scotland’s prosecuting authority and is headed by the Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain, the country’s senior law officer.

And as a result, gossip, speculation, claim and counterclaim have rushed in to fill the vacuum. But neither police nor prosecutors seem to have shown any interest in issuing either confirmation or denials to whichever rumour is currently doing the rounds.

To take but one instance – the supposed deadline for an end to the investigation and, presumably, for charges to be laid against alleged perpetrators would happen, we were “reliably informed”, before Sir Iain retired on August 10. But that date came and went and nothing happened.

Then it was rumoured that there would be an announcement when the Scottish Parliament resumed after the summer recess in September. Again nothing.

The arrival of Police Scotland’s new chief constable, Jo Farrell, would surely see movement on Branchform, wouldn’t it? Not a chance, it was merely another date that came and went, as did Christmas and the New Year.

It is accepted that this case is highly complex and time-consuming and we shouldn’t expect a running commentary from the officers involved. Nevertheless, there are questions that could be answered.

For instance, on leaving office Sir Iain at least suggested what his officers were investigating and that their probe had gone further than just the missing SNP money. Is that still the case two years later? Or has it again been extended? The new chief could surely answer that.

Whether charges are likely, or even probable, in the near future are for the Lord Advocate to answer. But how does she answer criticism that as a member of the Scottish Government her role has lost its independence?

Furthermore is there anything in the rumours of disputes between police and prosecutors, for instance over how many people should be charged?

The public doesn’t expect to be a party to any or all of the information currently being assembled. But this is an investigation with well understood political overtones and, especially in an election year, voters deserve more information than has hitherto been the case.