'It was a pantomime': SNP whistleblowers claim Murrell 'lied as easily as breathing' and reveal warnings over party finances were ignored

Breaking their silence for the first time, Cynthia Guthrie and Allison Graham, who served on the SNP's Finance and Audit Committee in early 2021 and blew the whistle on the party's finances five years ago, said they were on the receiving end of a "hostile" backlash driven by Nicola Sturgeon's “toxic culture” in the party.

Now, after Murrell's conviction for embezzling £400,000 of party funds, for which he will serve a sentence of five years and three months, the pair have spoken publicly about the culture inside the SNP, which they allege discouraged scrutiny and tolerated poor governance.

In a remarkable interview with LBC, Guthrie and Graham - who quit the party’s finance and audit committee along with the then Lord Provost of Edinburgh Frank Ross - said that Murrell “lied as easily as he was breathing” when they asked him about party finances - even as they highlighted seven-figure discrepancies in the party's accounts.

At one point, Ms Guthrie says, when she asked where the so-called “ring-fenced” independence fund was, Murrell pointed and stared into the distance and said: “I can see it”.

They described their experience on the committee as “a pantomime”, and say they were being used as “patsies” for a “cover up”, adding “this was not master criminal territory… it was like watching a bad magician trying to distract you from things… and too many were going along with it.”

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And Ms Graham also reveals she felt “threatened” by Nicola Sturgeon’s reaction - caught on a leaked video - after she read out her resignation statement, prompting the then-SNP leader to declare people should be “very careful about suggestions there are problems with the party’s finances.”

The two women, along with Mr Ross, had been recruited by the newly elected SNP treasurer, Douglas Chapman MP, to the party’s finance and audit committee (FAC) to help oversee the party's accounts.

All three would resign within weeks. Mr Chapman would resign later after the police investigation, Operation Branchform, began.

The pair say the last five years have been difficult. “It’s been an incredibly long time, seeing this all play out in public, being vilified, and not being able to speak publicly, because we wanted to do everything by the book.”

They insist they took on the roles believing, given their business backgrounds, they would be able to help improve systems within an organisation which had seen rapid growth after the 2014 independence referendum, but which was facing questions about its finances.

Instead, they claim they encountered stonewalling, confusion, contradictory answers and resistance when they began asking what they considered basic questions.

The FAC meetings took place on Zoom because of the Covid lockdown - but from the very start, they said they were aware something was wrong.

According to Ms Guthrie, concerns centred on money raised from supporters for independence for a second referendum campaign and repeated claims that those funds had been ring-fenced but had gone missing from the accounts.

"There was a lot of disquiet about funds that couldn't be accounted for properly," she says. “I asked Peter Murrell what we should say if people asked us about it. And he said ‘Oh, everything is fine’.

“So I asked - where is the money? Is it about £700,000? And he said ‘no it’s £582,000’ and so I said can you tell us where it is? And he actually looked in the mid-distance and pointed and said ‘I can see it’. And I found myself peering upwards like this in my laptop and said I can’t see it - it was quite comical, but tragic as it turned out.”

Ms Graham adds: “It was like watching a bad magician trying to distract you from things - it was really odd.

“The first question I asked was ‘when does your financial year start?’ and he said January, and this was February and we were being asked to agree a budget - and election spending - and none of that had been done in advance of the financial year starting. It was bizarre. And nobody else thought it was odd.

“So we asked for incredibly basic, reasonable stuff. We just got absolutely stonewalled.”

The pair claim they repeatedly sought information on membership figures, other incomings, outgoings, and the wider accounts, but were met with delays, incomplete answers and what they viewed as attempts to deflect scrutiny. They said they, along with Douglas Chapman, planned out workstreams, and even sent Murrell an Excel spreadsheet to fill out - “he just had to put in the numbers” - to no avail.

Ms Guthrie says: “You think it’s incompetence more than anything else. I asked how much income was from membership, and he at first said 70%, then it was 50%, but we knew they were shedding members, so I asked what’s the level of churn been in the last 12 months, and he didn’t know what I was talking about.

“Couldn’t give us membership figures, didn’t know how many people had left… as CEO, you have to know your figures, for basic solvency if nothing else.”

She adds: “At the first meeting of the FAC I went to, the party solicitor put some figures up on the screen, then almost immediately Peter Murrell said ‘no that’s the wrong one, take it down’ and it was swapped over. Then there were three columns of figures, and Frank pointed out one was out by £1.5m.

“Murrell wanted us to approve a budget, but faced with that, we just couldn’t.”

Ms Graham - who also sat on the party’s National Executive Committee at the same time - says: “He lied like he was breathing. For instance, we asked him how many memberships were £5 ones, and he said none, and we knew that was a lie because we were both on them.

“He said they were the most successful party in the UK as if that was all that mattered, and I said ‘that’s lovely, but we have questions’. We needed information to know that the party was solvent and the figures made sense. Especially with an election ahead.”

She adds: “At the end of the meeting, Peter Murrell said, ‘So we’ve approved the budget then?’ and we were saying, ‘No, can we refer you to the beginning where your columns didn’t add up and our questions… and he’d say, 'Oh yes we’ll get that to you no problem…' but of course he never did.

“And then, shockingly, the budget was signed off by the NEC in February. Everything we said was completely ignored. We had not approved it. It was minus £750,000, so the party was in the red. The NEC had a pie chart flung up on Zoom, and people just voted for it.

“Then, after that meeting, the party went on social media saying, ‘great news, we’ve passed the budget and have all this money for a referendum'. It was nonsense.

“Nobody should have been voting for any of this stuff because none of it was decision-ready. There were people on that NEC who never said a word, never asked a question, and just voted with the leadership.

“So there was a perception that everything was fine… we were being treated for fools. But this was not master criminal territory. This was like a pantomime.”

Describing the party atmosphere as one of "positional authority blindness", she says she was "shocked" by the budget being approved.

"First thing I did was contact Cynthia and Frank and say they've just passed that budget. I contacted Douglas to get him to apologise and withdraw it, and say we'd try and get it right for the next meeting. But it became clear that we had no chance of that happening.

“We were trying to work at pace, but we got stonewalled with utter nonsense, and gaslit and treated like fools.

“Someone else on the NEC even said to us ‘Yes, we asked questions when we first started too, but you know Peter makes it all happen and it's fine'. We couldn’t believe it."

Ms Graham also alleges that at the time there was no directorial insurance carried by the party which would have protected NEC members from being liable should something go wrong with the finances - “and I was mocked for raising that,” she says. “But I quite like my house.”

Tensions eventually came to a head when Murrell wrote to the FAC telling them he was going to hire three new staff.

Ms Guthrie, who describes Murrell as “slippery”, says: “You know, in a perilous situation where your accounts are all over the place, the last thing you do is put staff costs in. And that sentence came out and hit me, and I thought, I can't take this anymore. Because if I can't change this. Who am I going to go to? His wife?

“Who's going to do anything about this? And the whole thing became so unhealthy, and on a personal and professional level, it was untenable for me.

“Where on earth was the money coming from for that? I had distinctly told him that the party couldn’t do that in the first meeting. And yet he was going ahead anyway. That’s what did it for me.”

Ms Graham says: “On the NEC, I was saying that we weren’t getting the information. The business convener, Kirsten Oswald, kept saying we were getting quality information - that wasn’t the case. It was like we were asking for apples and getting pomegranates. Yes, both fruit, but not what was needed.

“Basically, the Finance and Audit Committee was a sham,” she said.

“We weren't there to fulfil a function. We were patsies… there to provide cover for whatever was going on. Not that we were able to find out what was going on.”

The trio resigned from the FAC on March 19, 2021, submitting a joint statement to the SNP's ruling National Executive Committee. In it, they laid out their concerns about the lack of information and said, “We can only conclude that there is a clear intention to prevent the FAC from doing its work for whatever reason.

“For professional and reputational reasons, we have individually tendered our resignations from the Committee to the Treasurer.”

They had hoped their resignations would shock the NEC into triggering a full investigation, but their concerns were dismissed.

Ms Graham says she took the decision to read out the resignation statement at the March meeting, as she wanted it to be minuted, so the party’s auditors were aware of their concerns. She says that in the minutes produced later by the NEC, the statement was not included.

Instead, she says she was subjected to a coordinated attack after making the statement, led, she alleges, by Nicola Sturgeon, who, in a leaked video, is seen warning party members not to discuss the SNP finances and claiming the party was in good shape.

Ms Graham says the “toxic atmosphere” inside the party came flooding out.

“We had no option to resign, but we felt we did it in a way that was the best for the party, so they could deal with it internally - we thought they should get in a forensic accountant. I really thought somebody would have taken control of that meeting and say, ‘Clearly that's a very serious statement you've just read'. But nobody asked any questions.

“And what happened next was entirely shocking and has taken me a long time to process.

“I got abusively attacked by a councillor who basically made me feel like I was a daft lassie, he didn’t know me but eviscerated my character and opened the floodgates for the attack on me, and then they all piled in on the [zoom] chat, including the First Minister, who said to him “Well said, Ian”.

“After that, she came in, which is the video people have seen, and it felt very threatening to me personally because it was to close down what I had said and make sure nobody else asked any questions.

“They were obsessed with leaks on the NEC, and she said the statement would be leaked, and they will be looking out for it. We were not going to leak that, and we never have made it public until now.

“I put my head down because it was so horrible. It felt like getting kicked in the playground. I tried to defend myself on the chat, and it just kept coming, and nobody spoke up for me or asked a question. It was extraordinary.”

John Swinney and other SNP figures have described the party as the victim of Murrell's criminal conduct.

But the whistleblowers insist the scandal cannot simply be written off as the actions of one individual.

'It's not good enough to say he was a master criminal and everybody else was a victim,' Ms Guthrie says.

“I thought he was incompetent, but there’s no doubt in my mind after going through all this, that the fact that Nicola Sturgeon, John Swinney were going out saying everything was fine, Kirsten Oswald batting everybody down, made him emboldened.

“We told the police we didn’t see evidence of criminality, but what I did see was shutting things down. I was mystified when the police came to me - it made no sense to me, buying campervans, at a time of Covid, when they had no money, but I think with his wife there and her saying everything was fine, if he had the innate characteristic that he would steal, it was like giving a child the key to a chocolate shop.”

Ms Graham adds: “Governance is not just operational, it’s a culture, and the problem was the culture. The problem is that by compartmentalising it into one person, you don't understand how it happened in the first place.

“The positional authority and the personal bias was ‘We know him, we think we know you, and you’re the baddies’, and that clouded everything.

“When I read the statement out at the NEC, they were shocked, but they were the ones with the power to do something, and we genuinely thought they would.

“In the Nicola video, she’s saying the party’s not been in better financial health... and I thought, how do you know that? What do you know that we don’t know? What gave you comfort to say the party was in good financial health? Do we just trust you because it's Peter?"

Five years later, both women say they remain deeply dissatisfied with the lessons learned from the affair.

“There are so many questions still unanswered,” says Ms Guthrie. “How in March can the leader of the party say they’re in great financial shape, then in June her husband gives a £100,000 loan for cashflow? It was her duty to know why“ that happened. It’s not good enough to say he was a master criminal and we’re the victims.

"The land of the Scottish Enlightenment has become the land of entitlement. Scottish Enlightenment made us strong, Scottish entitlement says don't ask questions, and there's a blindness that comes with this, and it's not good for us, it's not good for our country."

Despite their criticism, both insist they still support Scottish independence and bear no ill will towards the SNP.

'We don't wish them ill,' says Ms Graham. “We wish them better.

“I wasn’t planning to leave the SNP then, but because it was on Zoom my husband heard how I was spoken to and asked me how much we were paying in subscriptions to the party for you be treated like that, and he said ‘you are normalising bullying in our house in front of our kids and we really need to think about that’ and it was like cold water, I had never experienced anything like that before and never want to again.

“But every attitude I have heard since is the attitude that led to that, and I have zero confidence this couldn't happen again because they've learned nothing."

Asked if they thought it was because of the cause of independence, which made people look away from difficult questions, Ms Guthrie says: “A bit of that and it's still there.

“I am a confirmed nationalist, but then something developed called ‘wheesht for indy’, people saying ‘look it's bad, but it's our bad’, and I think that's been taken advantage of through poor stewardship and leadership.”

An SNP spokesperson told LBC: "John Swinney did not hold any position within the party, and was not a member of the party's NEC, during the time in question.

"When asked about these issues, Mr Swinney was simply setting out the expectations any party member would have about the financial scrutiny that is provided for under the SNP rules.

"Under the leadership of John Swinney, the party has undergone significant reform of its governance procedures.

“As Business Convener, Kirsten Oswald was committed to transparency, and she ensured that updates from NEC meetings were displayed on the party website following meetings.

"The criminal wrongdoing of Peter Murrell was uncovered by a complex and extensive police investigation years after the events in question. The SNP was the victim of that wrongdoing.”

Nicola Sturgeon's lawyer has been contacted for comment.