Humza Yousaf, the new Scottish National party leader, has made a barely concealed attack on his predecessor Nicola Sturgeon over the party’s financial management and transparency.
In a move designed to distance himself from Sturgeon, his mentor, after her husband, Peter Murrell, was arrested in an SNP funding inquiry, Yousaf said the party needed more openness with its members and greater financial accountability.
“There has to be more openness, more transparency around how we do things, for our members, for the confidence of the public,” he said at Bute House, his official residence in Edinburgh. “We absolutely can do better around governance and transparency. There’s no ifs or buts on that.”
The briefing was arranged after Murrell, the SNP’s former chief executive, was arrested at his and Sturgeon’s home on Wednesday morning by detectives involved in a long-running Police Scotland investigation into the party’s handling of more than £600,000 in donations.
Murrell was released without charge “pending further investigation” after almost 12 hours in custody, where he was questioned as a suspect under caution, police said.
Meanwhile, police searched the couple’s Glasgow home and garden, placing tents across the entrance to the semi-detached house, and seized documents at the SNP’s Edinburgh headquarters. Police remained outside both buildings on Thursday.
On Thursday morning, the Edinburgh science festival announced that Sturgeon had pulled out of a planned evening appearance alongside a climate crisis expert. Sturgeon’s spokesperson said the former first minister wanted to “keep the focus of the event on the critical issue of the climate emergency”.
Yousaf said he had no prior warning of the police raids and that the party was fully cooperating. He said Murrell was innocent until proven guilty, and he dismissed suggestions from his rivals in the independence movement, including the former health secretary Alex Neil, that the timing of the raid may have been secretly agreed with Sturgeon or the party.
Asked whether the raids would have affected the contest’s result if they had happened before Yousaf won, the first minister said: “That sounds to me like a conspiracy theory that we were in cahoots with Police Scotland around the timing. The timing of any investigation is absolutely for Police Scotland. It’s not determined by anybody else.”
However, Yousaf said the “debacle” over the party’s membership figures in the final stage of the contest, when it emerged that 30,000 members had quit in the preceding two years, highlighted real concerns and anger within the party about how it had been governed.
“There’s no question our members will feel bruised, not just by what was a challenging election contest but by the events of the last 24 hours as well,” he said.
Sturgeon was the party’s leader for eight years before she unexpectedly announced in February she would quit. Murrell was the SNP’s chief executive for 24 years before he suddenly resigned in March in a row over the SNP’s failure to disclose the party’s real membership figures.
The couple were regarded as wielding significant power over how the party was run – a concern acknowledged by their supporters, including Yousaf.
“I think the governance around financial accountability was not as good as it should have been,” Yousaf said. “And that’s, I think, frankly, pretty obvious.”
He said the forthcoming recruitment of a new chief executive and a review ordered by the party’s national executive committee into reforming its organisational accountability would allow the SNP to make a clear break with the past.
“I’m quite excited about that prospect because as the new leader, a new chief executive in place gives us the opportunity to hopefully bring new standards of governance and so on and so forth to the party,” he said.
“We’ll also have to make sure that these issues do not just rely on one individual, but we have a good structure in place at headquarters, one that has appropriate oversight and good governance surrounding it to be sure it does not rely on one single individual.”
Sturgeon has been contacted for comment.
