The white police evidence tags on the unused Montblanc pens, picnic sets, Le Creuset ramekins and the chrome Alessi teapot tell a story of a compulsive, often secretive shopaholic.
The £2,400 Smythson two-person tea set, complete in a beige picnic box, was found in a cupboard, unused, as were jewellery boxes and leather-bound writing folders. There were 11 Montblanc pens, with a white gold version worth £4,225, untouched in their gleaming presentation boxes.
The haul included a pair of Bremont watches, boxed and seemingly in showroom condition, still wrapped in cellophane, priced at £4,555.25 and £4,795 apiece. And there were nine unused tubes of Everbuild white one-hour decorator’s caulk (£21.50 a dozen).
The tags from the police photographs describe the items being found in cupboards, desk drawers or Peter Murrell’s garage and garden shed at the Glasgow home the former Scottish National party chief executive then shared with Nicola Sturgeon, the former first minister.
There was even an elaborate Netatmo wifi-enabled home weather station, built to record rainfall, wind speed and direction, bolted on to their garden fence. Its value was unrecorded on the photograph.
Some were recovered from the SNP’s headquarters in Edinburgh, raided by police on the same day.
In one image, a reflection of the police photographer is seen in the polished chrome Alessi teapot, found in Murrell’s unused luxury motorhome parked at his mother’s house in Fife.
But that haul was only a fraction of the acquisitions Murrell, 61, funded by embezzlement. Detectives involved said many of the items were never recovered, including the infamous set of Lalique Feuilles salt and pepper grinders, priced at £2,618.
Some things were literally consumed. None of the goods Murrell apparently gave away as gifts have been returned – with the exception of the presents to Sturgeon, found in the police raid. Those included the 9-carat gold and enamalled pendant Murrell bought for her on Shetland, which she proudly wore repeatedly.
In one of four police interview clips released to the media, Murrell is challenged by a detective on why he spent more than £19,000 on luxury pens. “It’s quite frankly an outrageous amount of money to be spending on pens,” the officer said. Murrell did not respond.
It also remains unclear whether the inventory of goods Murrell admitted in court last month to stealing, valued at just over £400,135, is complete. The detectives involved do not know whether they failed to find other things he bought because of the difficulty in recovering financial records or shop receipts dating back to 2010.
The investigation lasted nearly three years and cost about £2m, largely because of the complicated and exhausting process of verifying which items Murrell had bought, when, how and with what money.
That involved numerous warrants to banks to seize financial records and drawn-out approaches to retailers outside the UK, overseen by Police Scotland economic crime detectives and forensic accountants. In all the statement of evidence ran to 318 pages.
Police Scotland originally launched Operation Branchform after a pro-independence activist, Sean Clerkin, made a complaint in March 2021, alleging the SNP had misused more than £600,000 in donations for a putative referendum campaign which, he alleged, never happened.
The suspicions began when a pro-independence blogger, Wings Over Scotland, said this money had disappeared from the SNP’s accounts in October 2020. Detectives soon had more than a dozen similar complaints from party members and donors; 12 people were interviewed.
It began as a fraud investigation but police soon decided there was insufficient evidence of fraud.
They could not show Sturgeon or the party set out to knowingly deceive donors, or proof of what exactly the fundraising campaigns were set up to pay for. It was all too woolly, prosecutors concluded. Sturgeon has denied any wrongdoing.
What they did find evidence for was embezzlement after their suspicions were raised by the discovery of some Le Creuset kitchenware. To their surprise, Murrell continued to embezzle and to fake invoices and misrecord spending on the SNP’s Salesforce accounts system, for months after he knew the police were investigating the party’s finances.
