Meeting of the Parliament 24 February 2026 [Draft]
I rise to make a plea to the minister to consider granting a statement in the Parliament, either later today or tomorrow, from the Lord Advocate. The minister can look like that if he wants, but, in the past hour, we have had a dump of 70 pages of information from the Lord Advocate that contains material that is extremely damning for the Scottish National Party Government.
If those of us in the chamber thought that it was bad enough that the Lord Advocate briefed the First Minister of Scotland and the SNP leader on this case in January 2026, when nobody else knew, we simply have to go to page 6 of her bundle of papers, which shows that the Lord Advocate also briefed the First Minister of Scotland and the SNP leader, John Swinney, about this case on 20 March 2025.
For almost a year, the only person who was not involved in this criminal trial to have information about the scale of the alleged embezzlement was Scotland’s First Minister and leader of the SNP. Why did the Lord Advocate feel the need to provide that information to the SNP leader in March of last year and then again in January of this year?
On the date that the information was provided to John Swinney—20 March 2025—journalists and the public were still being told that they could not be provided with any further information. Paragraph 6 of the Lord Advocate’s memo to the First Minister on 20 March 2025 states very clearly:
“6. Crown Counsel have decided that Peter Murrell should appear on petition at Edinburgh Sheriff Court charged with embezzling over £460,000 from the SNP.”
Why did the SNP leader need to know that when nobody else in Scotland was allowed to know that? Why did the Lord Advocate, who sits in John Swinney’s Cabinet, feel that he needed to know that information but nobody else did?
Given the concerns that were raised in the chamber last week about the First Minister having perhaps a few weeks’ prior notice, I again ask the minister what it now says about our justice system, our political system and the conflict between the roles of the Lord Advocate as both head of the Crown Office and as a member of the Cabinet that this information was provided to the First Minister almost a year ago and that that was kept secret?