Big salaries, a motorhome and SNP accounts: The Nicola Sturgeon interview unwrapped

Former first minister Nicola Sturgeon spoke exclusively and in detail to the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg about the £400,000 embezzled by her estranged husband.

Over a 12-year period, Peter Murrell - who was chief executive of the SNP for more than 20 years - spent party money on more than 1,000 items, from expensive coffee machines to a £124,000 campervan.

Here we give some of the background to key quotes from the interview.

"None of these things [the purchases] I would have looked at and thought how on earth could he afford them? We were two people on high salaries. We don't have children. We didn't have an extensive social life, mainly because of the pressures of my job."

Peter Murrell had been chief executive of the SNP for more than 20 years when he stood down in 2023. He reportedly earned £104,492 in 2011 but this fell to £79,750 by 2021.

As for Sturgeon, the party published her tax details, covering the years 2014 to 2022. For 2021-22 she had a gross income of £140,496, paying just over £51,500 in income tax.

The paperwork also showed she put large sums into her pension each year. Sturgeon was a member of the Scottish parliament for 27 years and for her nine years as FM she put more than £450,000 into her pension.

She first published her tax returns in 2016, in the wake of the Panama Papers revelations, and during a Q&A in early February 2023 she urged other party leaders to do the same.

At that same question and answer session she was asked about Murrell's 2021 loan of £107,000 to the SNP to help with "cash flow" following that year's Holyrood election campaign.

Sturgeon said she could not recall when she first found out about the loan and insisted that "what he [Murrell] does with his resources is a matter for him".

"When I found out about the campervan in early 2023. I asked him [Peter Murrell] why on earth he bought a campervan. And the explanation I got then was that this had been bought in advance of the 2021 election."

A motorhome was by far the largest item, in terms of both value and size, purchased by Murrell with SNP cash.

In late 2020, he bought a luxury Niesmann and Bischoff Smove 7.4e from a dealership in Stafford for £124,550.

He also paid for a steering wheel lock and wheel clamp for £168 a few months later.

The campervan appears to have been parked 40 miles away from the couple's house on the outskirts of Glasgow. It sat outside the home of Murrell's elderly mother in Dunfermline for two years before it was impounded by police.

When Sturgeon stepped down as first minister her successor Humza Yousaf said he only found out about the motorhome after he became leader, when the vehicle appeared on a police warrant to seize items from the party.

• Sturgeon tells BBC: I'm serving a sentence for crime I didn't commit
• Coffee machines, fountain pens and Grand Theft Auto: How Murrell spent the money

Ahead of Sturgeon's Kuenssberg interview, her lawyer Aamer Anwar insisted his client never spotted the 24ft-long motorhome parked in the driveway at the side of her mother-in-law house during her visits.

He said: "On the question of the motorhome, armchair detectives might wish to turn back the clock, check Google Maps, replace a caravan with a motorhome, work out its dimensions, and 'speculate' if Ms Sturgeon could see through walls to the other side of the house, but that is entirely a matter for them."

"There was no occasion that somebody came to me and said we're concerned that somebody is embezzling money from the SNP. And there was nothing ever in the accounts. If qualified auditors weren't able to see that when they approved the accounts I'm not sure how I or the national treasurer should have been able to see that."

In May 2021 the then MP for Dunfermline and West Fife, Douglas Chapman, quit as national treasurer of the party after he claimed he was not given enough information to do the job.

At the time, the then deputy first minister John Swinney told the BBC that there was a "huge amount of scrutiny of party finances that go on".

He said the accounts were "independently audited by external auditors and are submitted to the electoral commission for scrutiny".

The SNP's 2021 accounts showed total income was £4,510,460, total expenditure was £5,262,032, assets were £1,630,454 and liabilities were £1,055,689.

The party's total income was £4,510,460, total expenditure was £5,262,032, assets were £1,630,454 and liabilities were £1,055,689.

Electoral Commission rules state any party with income or expenditure of more than £250,000 is required by law to also independently audit their accounts and include this report in their submission.

Accountants Johnston Carmichael audited SNP finances for more than 10 years but resigned from the role before Murrell's arrest. They said they were stepping away following "a review of clients".

The company was founded in 1936 and is Scotland's largest independent firm of chartered accountants and business advisers.

Manchester-based accountants AMS Accounts Group took on the books after Johnston Carmichael, but Scottish firm MMG Chartered Accountants, which has recently merged with TC Group, now audits the party finances.

"I am not guilty of that embezzlement so nothing that belongs to me should be part of that. Rightly it should not be part of that."

The ability to freeze, seize and confiscate money and assets derived from illegal activities is rooted in the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002.

At a future date a special court hearing will look at recovering the embezzled money.

After former SNP MP Natalie McGarry was jailed in June 2022 for embezzling £25,000 from Women for Independence and the Glasgow Regional Association she faced a proceeds of crime hearing 15 months later. In her case, the Crown accountant agreed a payback amount of £66.36.

At the time, Fiscal Depute Brian Duffy said that the figure was "the only amount available to Miss McGarry towards the confiscation order".

Items, such as the necklace which Sturgeon said she loved wearing, could be considered by the hearing as "tainted gifts" and subsequently seized. It is unclear if the pendant, bought from Shetland Jewellery and valued at more then £400, is already in the possession of the police.

The £124,000 campervan was seized in April 2023 - the month after Murrell was first questioned - and put in a police compound.

In June 2024, three months after Murrell was charged, the Daily Record newspaper reported that Scotland's lord advocate had put a legal restriction on him selling any property he owned, which would include his and Sturgeon's home.

The detached house in Baillieston, a residential suburb in the east of Glasgow, would be valued in excess of £380,000.