Branchform costs rise to £3.4M as Crown spending tops £1M

The cost of the criminal investigation into the SNP’s finances has risen to nearly £3.5million, the Mail can reveal.

Data released by the Crown Office states its expenditure on the five-year probe has topped £1million – up from around £840,000 reported in February.

The new figures mean the combined total of spending by prosecutors and Police Scotland is around £3.4million.

Operation Branchform led to a jail sentence of more than five years for former SNP chief executive Peter Murrell in June for embezzling over £400,000 of SNP funds.

Scottish Tory finance spokesman Craig Hoy: ‘The huge costs of this investigation will be having a major impact on justice budgets which are already under significant strain after years of SNP cuts.

‘The level of spending by both the police and the Crown Office reflects the seriousness of Operation Branchform which ultimately resulted in Nicola Sturgeon’s thieving husband being convicted.

‘However, these costs would have been drastically reduced if Murrell and others had been upfront about his criminal activity from the start.’

The Crown Office said £1,085,995 had been spent on Operation Branchform up to June 16 including £19,683 on Crown counsel and £15 on ‘travel and subsistence’, with £1,066,297 on ‘staffing costs’.

 In July last year, the Mail reported the Crown had spent £460,000 on the probe - meaning the total more than doubled over the past year.

Separately, Police Scotland spent £2,173,089 on Operation Branchform with additional overtime costs of £100,498, according to figures published by the force in May, meaning total police and Crown spending is £3,359,582.

Operation Branchform was launched in July 2021 to look into how more than £600,000 of crowdfunding was used by the SNP.

It became one of the longest-running fraud investigations in Police Scotland’s history.

Murrell, his now estranged wife and former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, and ex-SNP treasurer Colin Beattie were all investigated by detectives as part of the probe.

In March last year, it emerged Ms Sturgeon and Mr Beattie would not face charges.

Murrell, 61, was jailed last month for embezzling SNP funds over a period of 12 years.

He used the cash to make hundreds of extravagant purchases, including a £124,550 motorhome, cars, jewellery, luxury homeware, and designer stationery.

In May, temporary Deputy Chief Constable Stuart Houston said Operation Branchform was ‘complex’ and Murrell had been skilled at covering up his fraud.

He said the investigation into Murrell’s fraud took years to complete partly because the SNP’s accounts system was so ‘difficult to unpick’.

Mr Houston said Police Scotland’s specialist crime division (SCD) had been key to its success.

At a public board meeting of the Scottish Police Authority in Glasgow in May, Mr Houston defended the cost of the investigation.

He said: ‘I would go back to the complexity of this. It spanned a 12-year period [covering] someone who has been continually covering their tracks in an accounting system that was difficult to unpick.

‘You’ve probably all seen the number of items [paid for with embezzled cash] in the indictment.

‘There had to be a thorough investigation to evidence every part of that and get us to the position where we got a guilty plea.

‘There’s a lot of work that’s gone into that - and a long-term commitment by the team.’

During sentencing at the High Court in Edinburgh, judge Lord Young said Murrell had managed to ‘circumvent’ checks and balances because of his position of authority in the party but also said that the manner of the embezzlement was ‘not particularly sophisticated’.

A spokesman for the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service said: ‘Resources were applied to this investigation, which included prosecution, in line with its significance.

‘Prosecutors take decisions independently, free from political influence or external interference, relying on evidence and the law.’