There is a well known Scottish nationalist Twitter account dedicated to bullying and intimidating BBC journalists for asking perfectly legitimate questions of the SNP. It is followed by several members of John Swinney’s cabinet.
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Sam Taylor
24.8K posts
Sam Taylor
@staylorish
Runs @These_Islands. “cannot stand the awesome reality of Scotland’s energy wealth” - Alex Salmond. Tweeting in a personal capacity.
Edinburgh, Scotland Katılım Ekim 2016
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“Anyone who asked questions was vilified as a traitor to the party, marginalised, bullied and intimidated.”
Replace “party” with “Scotland” here, and anyone who has criticised (or even just questioned) the SNP will immediately recognise the behaviour Joanna Cherry is describing.
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@Alfaromeo170 What was Mike Russell doing here, if he wasn’t covering up that the money had gone missing?
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@staylorish There is zero evidence of a cover up. The party publicly argued that funds went into general operations to support independence, The donors were indeed lied to, but the liar was Peter Murrell, who was actively deceiving his donors, his party, and his own wife all at the same time
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1/ The infamous SNP crowdfunder raised £482k in 2017, to be ringfenced for a future referendum campaign. Yet by 31st December 2017, the SNP had just £8k of cash in the bank. This was fully public information, clearly displayed in the 2017 accounts, published on 21st August 2018.
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Sam Taylor retweetledi
Gillian Mackay backs a price cap on food essentials despite tiny supermarket profit margins which have not risen over the last 20 years.
“But they’ve not gone down either.”
Actually, they have. Every major UK supermarket has a lower profit margin today than it did 20 years ago.
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Nicola Sturgeon’s bookcases were a familiar backdrop to her media appearances during Covid. Looks like they might have been paid for with stolen money (in part, at least).
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The spend on pens alone is astonishing - roughly £20k in total by my tally. These are some of the more expensive ones.
Chris Musson@ChrisMusson
We have a searchable full list of the items bought by Nicola Sturgeon's husband Peter Murrell during his £400k embezzlement spree. Includes a robot lawn mower, £2.5k salt & pepper pots, posh pans, luxury pens, a £110 pencil sharpener, and Borgen DVDs thescottishsun.co.uk/news/16301682/…
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@Alfaromeo170 And donors had been told the crowdfunded money would be ringfenced, and not spent on normal operating costs. That’s *why* there was a cover up. The party knew the money was gone, and that donors had been lied to. So they covered up the money having gone missing.
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@staylorish If the books were flooded with fake invoices making the spending look entirely legitimate, why would anyone look at the bank balance and assume money had "gone missing" or been "frittered"? The deception hid the deficit as normal operating costs.
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@Alfaromeo170 I didn’t say he should have been able to deduce a criminal fraud. I said he must have known the money had gone missing. It might have been frittered away on legitimate expenses. That would have meant donors had been lied to, but probably wouldn’t have been a criminal offence.
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@staylorish Peak hindsight bias and revisionism. The court confirmed Murrell used fake invoices and receipts to make his theft look like the missing money was a legitimate SNP spend . Insinuating JS should have magically deduced a criminal fraud from a standard cash-flow balance is bad faith
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@JamesMa48542294 @JohnSwinney I accuse Swinney because it is impossible to believe that over a period of three years he never looked at the accounts and noticed from the balance sheet that the money had gone missing. I do believe he didn’t know Murrell had stolen it. But he must have known it was missing.
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@staylorish @JohnSwinney And how do you know questions weren't asked and they were batted away or fobbed off and he was trusted! You accuse Swinney for political gain when he was not involved in the finances and Murrell was not reporting to him
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Labour activist @staylorish knows there is no mileage in accusing Sturgeon as she is no longer in politics so has instead decided to represent his opinion as fact. Sue him @JohnSwinney
Sam Taylor@staylorish
Well… this is awkward. John Swinney speaking here on the Sunday Show on 30th May 2021. By this stage the SNP accounts proved that the money had gone missing and Swinney had clearly looked at those accounts. John Swinney was part of the cover up operation.
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When your political philosophy casts Scottish nationalists as good people and everyone else as traitors, this is what happens. John Swinney says he simply cannot get his head around the idea that someone involved with the SNP could be a wrong ’un.
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@JamesMa48542294 @JohnSwinney Murrell falsified how the money was spent. But he wasn’t able to falsify the actual bank balance. The actual bank balance is what proved the money was missing. How it went missing was another matter.
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@staylorish @JohnSwinney Whilst ignoring the fact the money was taken by a fraudster who was falsifying accounts & covering his tracks years before the crowd founder youve decided to accuse others of a cover up when they were probably affording him the same trust he'd been given for 20+ years
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@staylorish You can speculate and make unfounded allegations all you want but the fact remains that following a 4 year investigation, one dishonest fraudster was found to be culpable and how do you know the "ring fenced" money wasn't in a separate account?
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So… the SNP top brass cannot read financial statements, cannot evaluate evidence, and cannot tell the truth. The party must be mightily relieved that none of these frailties have infected its thinking on Scottish independence.
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@Alfaromeo170 Murrell falsified how the money was spent. But he wasn’t able to falsify the actual bank balance. The actual bank balance is what proved the money was missing. How it went missing was another matter.
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@staylorish PM admitted to falsifying the accounts and using fabricated invoices to mask his personal spending as legitimate party expenses. The idea that John Swinney should have seen through a deliberate, criminal manipulation of figures on a standard balance sheet is totally untenable.
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Sam Taylor retweetledi
2/ John Swinney knows how to read a balance sheet. But nearly 3 years after those accounts were published, he was feigning bafflement that any money could possibly be missing. He may not have known where it had gone, but to pretend he didn’t know it had gone missing is untenable.
Sam Taylor@staylorish
Well… this is awkward. John Swinney speaking here on the Sunday Show on 30th May 2021. By this stage the SNP accounts proved that the money had gone missing and Swinney had clearly looked at those accounts. John Swinney was part of the cover up operation.
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Sam Taylor retweetledi
The SNP is marinated in the idea that you can have lovely things without knowing, or even caring, who is paying for them. Peter Murrell is not really an aberration, but an example of taking that philosophy a step too far.
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