NICOLA STURGEON HAS said her estranged husband Peter Murrell has never explained to her why he embezzled more than £400,000 (€461,000) from the SNP as she spoke of the “trauma” she has gone through.
The former Scottish first minister also said she feels like she is “serving a sentence for a crime I did not commit” after Murrell pleaded guilty at the High Court in Edinburgh this week to embezzling the sum from the SNP between 2010 and 2022.
Murrell (61) spent the money on items including a motorhome, cars, kitchen gadgets, expensive watches and pens, and more mundane purchases such as hand cream and toilet seats.
Sturgeon said the couple were both on high salaries, and she thought their incomes would have supported anything she saw in her house.
In an interview on the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg programme, Sturgeon said that Murrell told her a few days before the court hearing that he was going to plead guilty.
Asked whether he had ever given her an explanation she said: “I haven’t seen him from the point he told me he was going to plead guilty until he pled guilty on Monday, because I wasn’t able to – just emotionally wasn’t able to deal with that.
“So he’s never sat down and given me his account. Now, presumably I will hear his account from the court at some point, but he’s never given me an explanation.”
Kuenssberg asked: “Have you asked him for one?” to which she replied: “Yeah, but he’s never given it to me.”
Sturgeon also said that angry does not even begin to cover how she feels about Murrell.
She said he “lied to me and betrayed me” and that he “put me into a position of real peril.”
She added: “Am I angry at him? Yes, I’m angry, but I’m also carrying a degree of hurt and I think a degree of trauma about – this whole episode resulted in my sitting in a police station under arrest.
“What he has done to me I think will take me a very, very long time to recover from.”
Reflecting on some of the items Murrell bought, Sturgeon said that she was working round the clock most days in her role as First Minister and that she did not have much if anything to do with the administration of the household.
She said: “Just to explain how our finances worked, we had separate bank accounts, I never had any access to his bank account, he didn’t have any to mine. Every month I would pass him a sum of money to cover my share of the household expenses and leave him to it.”
Sturgeon also said: “I absolutely didn’t know that he was committing crimes.”
The former first minister spoke of the “pain” and “bewilderment” she felt upon discovering that some of the gifts Murrell gave her had been purchased with money he embezzled, including a £425 (€490) necklace he bought for her from a shop in Shetland that she was often pictured wearing.
Murrell is set to be sentenced in June, the same month that the SNP faces two byelection contests – one in Aberdeen South and another in Arbroath and Broughty Ferry.
The SNP has faced calls for an independent inquiry into its finances.
Sturgeon was Scotland’s first minister from 2014 to 2023 while Murrell served as the SNP chief executive from 2001 to 2023.
In the BBC interview, Sturgeon also said she is “not going to apologise for somebody else’s crimes”.
She said: “I will take responsibility for the things I do, the decisions I make. I’m sitting here with you right now, answering questions because I believe strongly in that accountability.
“But I am not responsible for the crimes that my former husband committed and I’m not going to apologise for somebody else’s crimes.”
Sturgeon previously said she had been “completely cleared and exonerated” by police and that she had been lied to by her former husband.
In the BBC interview she described the police investigation as “exhaustive and detailed and forensic”.
She told the BBC: “(Murrell) perpetrated a crime on the SNP.
“By definition, that included me as the party leader. He misled. He deceived.
“He is serving and will be serving a sentence for a crime he committed. I’m out here feeling as if I’m serving a sentence for a crime I did not commit.”