Having said she would make no further comment on the imprisonment of her husband, Nicola Sturgeon’s lawyer has issued two further statements on her behalf. Aamer Anwar – a sort of Better Call McSaul – is an odd choice to represent a former first minister who wants to be left alone, given that he’s perhaps the most limelight hungry lawyer in Scotland, if not all of Britain.
His latest utterance on behalf of his client addresses the claim that Sturgeon should have clocked her husband’s embezzlement through her oversight of the SNP’s accounts. Even if she had no idea what he was up to in the marital home, so the argument goes, she should have at least spotted the discrepancies in the SNP’s finances.
The statement reads:
‘To make it abundantly clear it was not the role of the First Minister to sign off accounts, that was for the party treasurer.
Furthermore, there appears to be an assumption that as FM, when Mr Murrell was busy buying multiple pens or pepper pots etc she was with him, Ms Sturgeon was not, as unsurprisingly she was busy with other matters.’
But this seems at worst to be deliberate misinformation and at best a misunderstanding of the law.
The Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 makes it quite clear that it is the legal duty of a party management committee or the leader to approve the party accounts:
And even if it is the case that a management committee exists within the SNP tasked with doing this (perhaps the NEC) the accounts themselves make it clear that the party’s office bearers (of which Sturgeon was principal) approved the accounts anyway:
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