Twelve Years On, Nobody Can Find the £1.5 Million

At four in the morning on 19 September 2014, Mary Pitcaithly stood in front of the cameras as Chief Counting Officer and delivered the line the whole apparatus of the referendum had been built to earn: "I am satisfied that all counts were conducted properly." Hundreds of independent observers had watched every count. Officers from Police Scotland had stood in every hall. International monitors had flown in to certify that all 3,623,344 ballot papers had been handled honestly. Turnout was 84.6 per cent, the highest in any Scottish election since women got the vote in 1918. It was, by any reasonable measure, one of the best-scrutinised democratic exercises this country has run.

The votes were audited to destruction. The money was not audited at all.

Yes Scotland Ltd, the company Alex Salmond set up in May 2012 to run the official pro-independence campaign, disclosed in April 2013 that it had taken in £1.6m in donations, more than a fifth of it from a single euromillions-winning couple, plus £342,797 from the SNP itself for start-up costs. It fought the campaign, lost it, and then did what campaign companies do: it went dormant. No activity since 2014. A run of quiet accounts, the most recent published last year, showing a balance of zero.

That is where the story should have ended. This week, twelve years on, a Police Scotland complaint says it did not. The complaint comes from David Henry, a former SNP branch secretary whose earlier concerns about party finances triggered Operation Branchform, the investigation that eventually put former SNP chief executive Peter Murrell in prison for more than five years for embezzling £400,000. Henry's new dossier concerns a note in Yes Scotland's 2014 accounts: income of £1,524,998 that, he says, does not reconcile with what follows. "Major corrections appeared in the 2015 accounts," he told the Sunday Mail. "Nothing adds up." Police Scotland confirms only that "inquiries are ongoing," which is the institutional equivalent of a shrug with a case number attached.

The SNP's defence, offered promptly, is that Yes Scotland Ltd was "an entirely separate organisation" from the party. True in the sense that a subsidiary is separate from its parent, and less true in the sense that the party founded it, staffed its launch, and had its books signed off by SNP officers. The defence deserves a fair hearing, because the separation argument is not absurd on its face. Campaign companies exist precisely so that a single-issue, cross-party effort can raise and spend money without dragging every donor into party membership. Yes Scotland always insisted it was broader than the SNP, drawing on Business for Scotland, Women for Independence, a scattering of actors and a former Bond. Better Together was structured the same way. There is nothing sinister, in principle, about a referendum vehicle that dissolves once the referendum is over.

But dissolution is exactly the problem. A company can go dormant. A question cannot. Yes Scotland folded its books, filed its zeros, and took the answer to "where did £1.5m go" into administrative hibernation along with it — beyond the reach of journalists, of the SNP's own later scrutiny, and, until Henry walked into Gayfield Square police station with a dossier, of the police. Nobody audited the audit. The company that owed an explanation had, by the time anyone thought to ask for one, no obligation left to give.

Trace the accountability chain and it runs out where these chains always run out: at a company registrar's filing cabinet. Who signed the 2013 accounts. Who authorised the corrections in 2015. Who decided that a company holding £1.5m of public donations for a national referendum could report a zero balance a year later and call that a filing rather than a confession. These are not unanswerable questions. They are simply questions nobody with the power to ask them chose to ask, for a decade, until a man with a grudge and a spreadsheet did it for them.

There is a reason this keeps happening in the same shape. Murrell embezzled from a party with members, conference votes, and at least the theoretical possibility of internal challenge. Yes Scotland was a company with directors and no electorate at all, which raised more money in eighteen months than most parliamentary candidates see in a career and then dissolved before anyone had reason to ask where it went. Britain's electoral law regulates parties reasonably well and regulates campaign companies barely at all. The gap between the two is where the £1.5m sits, presumably, still.

This is not a Scottish curiosity. The current Westminster argument over donation caps and undisclosed benefits — over whether a wealthy individual can fund a party through a shell, a loan, or a gift in kind that never quite counts as a donation — is the same argument at a different postcode. The Electoral Commission can fine a party. It has essentially no purchase on a company that campaigned for a single vote and then obligingly stopped existing. We built one of the best-observed ballots in our history and left the wallet on a park bench.

The count was watched by thousands. The money was watched by nobody, and the difference between those two facts is the whole of this column in miniature: we have become extremely good at auditing the parts of democracy that are cheap to audit, and have stopped bothering with the parts that cost something to check. Scotland asked, on 18 September 2014, whether it should govern itself. It got an answer. The country is still waiting for the answer to the smaller, ruder question — where the £1.5m went, and who was ever supposed to make sure we'd know.