Watch: Sturgeon denies SNP financial woes in leaked footage
The Spectator says Three cheers for the Sunday Mail, which has today got its hands on footage of Nicola Sturgeon which is, er, sub-optimal, to say the least. The newspaper has been sent a video of the then First Minister furiously insisting that the SNP’s finances had ‘never been stronger’ in a meeting of the party’s ruling body in March 2021.
Sturgeon is shown warning SNP apparatchiks on the National Executive Committee (NEC) to be ‘very careful’ about suggesting there was ‘any problems’ with the accounts’ in an angry statement that came after three members resigned from the party’s finance and audit committee. One of them, Allison Graham, had just read out a statement listing a catalogue of concerns over governance and transparency. Sturgeon responded by telling the NEC that:
“The party has never been in a stronger financial position than it is right now and that’s a reflection of our strength and our membership… I’m not going to get into the details… But, you know, just be very careful, all of us, about suggestions that there are problems with the party’s finances, because we depend on donors to donate. There are no reasons for people to be concerned about the party’s finances, and all of us need to be careful about not suggesting that there is. And lastly, we’ve got to be careful as an NEC that we don’t reap what we sow, if we have leaks from this body it limits the ability for open free and frank discussion… If there are leaks, as with everything else, that gets more difficult to do so everybody has to be very clear about that.”
Nicola Sturgeon via leaked video footage
How ironic that it has now leaked. It comes as the paper reports that jewellery purchases are now being probed by the police as part of a fraud investigation sparked by claims of misappropriated donations. Both Nicola Sturgeon and Peter Murrell have declined to comment on the video.
