This is delightfully petty in one way:
Police ‘seize luxury campervan’ from Nicola Sturgeon’s mother-in-law
The confiscation of the vehicle, models of which can sell for around £110,000, reportedly took place on Wednesday
Now of course there has been no corruption, no nicking at all. But imagine, just for the point of the story, that there had been. So, we’ve people in charge of an entire country. They nick a caravan. Petty, small minded, innit?
But of course there has been no nicking.
Except, well, I always thought that the allegation was that the £600k raised for the referendum had been spent on party expenses to win elections. Is this now some new set of thoughts, that personal monies need to be examined?
That would be interesting, would it not?
Last month, it was disclosed that police were investigating high-value transactions, including the purchase of cars.
Oh.
It’s all too easy to see a slight coincidence and jump to conclusions. Apparently Mr Murrell made a personal loan of £107,620 to the SNP to aid cash flow. Even if by some wild coincidence this turns out to also be exactly(!) what was paid for the luxury camper van, it must still be a complete coincidence.
It’s revealing to see how people choose to spend a £110k windfall. A luxury caravan would never even have occurred to me.
@AndrewM… Obviously no Gypsies in your bloodline.
Is this a “proceeds of crime” confiscation or did the camper van contain £300k of drugs and jewels with the remaining £300k of gold ingots buried in the front garden?
Has the SNP ever been this interesting before?
Bernie G
Was it in Periwinkle blue ?
N’ d’ye like dags ?
I saw last week, the wise saying
“You may be having a hard day, but spare a thought for the poor cop who has to go through Nicola Sturgeon’s knickers drawer.”
@AndrewM
Perhaps a never used luxury motorhome holds its secondhand value very well so when you come to sell it three years later a good percentage of that sum ends up back in your bank account, and the bill of sale proves it all to be a legitimate and tax free sale of assets.
I think the caravan was akin to me giving a tip in South Africa 25 years ago.
$5 and the waiter thought I was a black market king-pin.
(an old Africa hand told me to carry some $ for emergencies)
After the ferries, it must have seemed like small change.
Of course, any inference that there was some malfeasance in this area is a scurrilous English lie and totally untrue.
Andrew M,
“It’s revealing to see how people choose to spend a £110k windfall. A luxury caravan would never even have occurred to me.”
I once crunched the numbers on a basic caravan, and couldn’t understand how it added up. They seem to cost about £50K new, but you can rent a van from Eurocamp in France (including all the site fees) for about £1200/week. And those are much nicer vans, more like a cabin with shower, toilet and proper bedrooms. Even if you throw in a few weekends away in the Cotswolds it’ll take decades to recoup.
@Grist: “Westminster lie,” please. You have to say that so nobody will think you’re dog-whistling anti-English racism.
Chris – Yarp, but please remember there’s nobody the SNP hates more furiously than Other Scots.
And now they have a leader who makes no secret of his contempt for “white people” in general.
At least America politicos get seriously rich with the Clinton Foundation, the Obama’s numerous book and media deals and the international activities (and untraceable artwork sales) of the Biden family being recent examples. Unelected EU high-flyers are similarly rewarded and benefit from the further advantage of being answerable to no-one.
By comparison the antics of Sturgeon former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern are positively embarrassing not least on account of their artlessness and the “petty cash” scale of their alleged misdeeds.
………Sturgeon and former Taoiseach…..
I don’t get all the ‘where has the money gone’ investigations. Does it matter what the money has been spent on? Surely the crime (if there is one) is of fraud against the donors of the money – they were promised the money would be held for a specific event (which hasn’t happened) and donated on that basis. If the money is no longer there then those people have been defrauded. What its been spent on is irrelevant. All money is fungible anyway, so how do you determine if the purchase of X was made with money that should have been ringfenced for a referendum campaign or money from SNP membership fees?
Jim – I don’t know the procedures in England far less Scotland, but I think there’s a basis for trying to realise the proceeds arising from a fraud so if the audit trail leads to a camper van parked at the home of a woman in her nineties, then seize it. The alternative, as I wrote above, is that the camper van has some evidential value in which case the answer, once again, is to seize it.
“It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine”.
Oh, I assumed it had been seized because they’d hidden the paperwork in it. It hadn’t even occurred to me that anyone would be so pathetic that the price of corruption would be a caravan.
The polis are investigating more than the 600k, that much most folk are certain about. Rumours abound that the Gupta deal is of interest. And of course head polis Livingston’s resignation has nothing to do with anything whatsoever.
Craig Murray writes a brew of utter rubbish laced with interesting remarks on stuff he actually knows about. Maybe he knows a bit about what’s going on here.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2023/04/high-level-corruption-in-scotland-continues/
For an entertaining comments thread you could try this.
https://wingsoverscotland.com/the-partys-over/#more-136844
Hell hath no fury like a Scotnaz scorned.
What no Scotnaz will do is confess “I must have had my head up my arse these last decades.”
My God,there’s some desperately deluded wankers on that Craig Murray site.
Is this the old con of buy asset (caravan) to use on campaign trips (or whatever money is supposed to be for), cancel or just use once then sell asset (caravan) for nominal price to a family member or friend.
I once had to go out and find and buy a nice RV for a state politician. Money came out of campaign funds.
It’s a wonderful helpful tool to someone who has to go out amongst the people across a state during a campaign. Criss-cross the state, stop where needed, but still live acceptably in areas where there are no good hotel choices.
Have no idea if that was the use of this campervan, but just sayin’ . . .
bobby b
Perhaps he was using to cook meth.
dearieme:
What no Scotnaz will do is confess “I must have had my head up my arse these last decades.”
Yep. Three things to remember:
1) Most of those “patriots” now declaring themselves sick of Sturgeon’s lies were busy cheering her to the rafters until relatively recently, long after the nature of her leadership became clear.
2) The padded cell inmates at Wings Over Scotland would not be reacting like this if it was their hero Alex Salmond getting busted for the misuse of 600k.
3) Truly fervent nationalists love to console themselves with the thought that anything bad besetting their “movement” is the work of the Brit nats/media/deep state, blah blah blah. The only difference in this instance is that whereas the hardcore loyalist SNP cadres view Sturgeon’s fall from grace as engineered by MI5/”the establishment”/whatever, the true zoomers over at Wings believe her to be some kind of undercover agent, paid by said establishment to ruin their cause from within.
Isn’t a feature of decent law-, enforcement supposed to be that the authorities can’t arbitrarily just take your stuff if it isn’t proven to be proceeds of crime? And isn’t the whole point of a decent civil society being that vindictive confiscation can’t just happen?
I loathe Nicola Sturgeon and the Scots Nat’s. But if it can happen to her, it can happen to me. And that is not the society I want to live in.
Confiscation of possible evidence is a bit different….
Yeah but the Scots Squad here really is trying to stretch the definition of ‘possible’ to include “impossible” isn’t it. Who seriously thinks they took donations for an independence referendum campaign and bought a mobile home? And how is it really evidence? The invoice and and the bank transfer, yes, evidence; the mobile home, it’s just a mobile home.