Salmond accuses Sturgeon of pursuing vendetta over report into harassment claims

Alex Salmond has accused Nicola Sturgeon’s government of pursuing a vendetta against him in a major battle over the release of the official report into sexual harassment claims against him.

In a further escalation of the long-running dispute between Salmond and his former friends and allies, it has emerged the Scottish government plans to ask a judge for permission to hand over the report that upheld two claims of alleged harassment against him to MSPs investigating the controversy.

John Swinney, Sturgeon’s deputy, has told a Scottish parliamentary committee the government wants to release the official report into the harassment complaints and a covering letter sent to Salmond by Leslie Evans, the permanent secretary of the Scottish government, in August 2018.

The government’s decision to uphold the complaints was leaked to the Daily Record newspaper, triggering a bitter legal battle. Salmond took the Scottish government to court and won in January 2019 when it admitted its internal inquiry was unlawful and “tainted by apparent bias”.

In a batch of new letters released by a Scottish parliamentary committee on Tuesday morning, Salmond’s lawyer, David McKie, said those documents should have been destroyed in January 2019 after Salmond won his case.

Swinney told the committee on Monday some papers had been destroyed, but the two documents sent to Salmond were kept.

McKie said that showed “the clear objective of the Scottish government is to tarnish the reputation of our client and to seek to distract the committee from the core remit of investigating the Scottish government and the first minister”.

Swinney revealed that government lawyers would go to the court of session seeking permission to release those papers, and up to 2,000 other pages of evidence and documentation used during Salmond’s civil action against the government.

Following a separate criminal trial in March 2020, Salmond was acquitted at the high court in Edinburgh of 14 charges of sexual assault, including one of attempted rape, involving nine female civil servants and Scottish National party officials.

Among a series of further disclosures on Tuesday, more questions emerged about Sturgeon’s failure to disclose that she was told in March 2019 Salmond was under investigation.

Sturgeon admitted earlier this month that she was told about the investigation by Salmond’s former chief of staff Geoff Aberdein when they met in her Holyrood office on 29 March 2018, but had forgotten it had taken place.

Sturgeon had repeatedly insisted she first learned of the allegations when Salmond told her during a private meeting at her home on 2 April, a meeting followed by phone calls, text messages and a further meeting between them.

Court papers released on Friday by the committee show the Scottish government had claimed during Salmond’s legal action she “first became aware of the existence of an investigation into [his] conduct in April 2018 when [he] made her so aware”.

It was not until 7 June 2018 that Sturgeon wrote to Evans to disclose those contacts, but her letter to Evans, released on Monday, does not mention meeting Aberdein. That delay has led to Sturgeon coming under a separate formal investigation for breaching the ministerial code by an independent ethics commission because the meeting involved government business.

Sturgeon has denied Salmond’s allegations of a conspiracy or of collusion. She told Sky News’s Sophy Ridge on Sunday: “I think the reason perhaps he is angry with me – and he clearly is angry with me – is that I didn’t cover it up, I didn’t collude with him to make these allegations go away.”

In a disclosure that will raise further questions about what Sturgeon knew and when, McKie also asserted that her principal private secretary, John Somers, twice met one of the two complainants in November 2017, soon after the complainer indicated she may have allegations to make against Salmond.

In his letter to the committee, McKie said another as-yet-unidentified person was at one of those meetings. They took place several weeks before Sturgeon signed off on the new anti-harassment policy in late December 2017 that allowed civil servants to make retrospective complaints against former ministers. The two complainants filed formal complaints against Salmond in January 2018.

Salmond’s allies allege the Scottish government admitted defeat in his civil action because his lawyers were about to call Somers, forcing him to admit Sturgeon’s office had had contact with the complainers.