Alex Salmond inquiry LIVE: Jackie Baillie lashes out at Nicola Sturgeon over ‘disrespectful’ witholding of legal docs

‘LINGERING SUSPICION’

NICOLA Sturgeon has insisted she was first informed of the two formal complaints about Alex Salmond by him on April 2 2018 – but told how she had a “lingering suspicion” there was something “in the undergrowth that might surface” before then.

The First Minister said a Sky News media query in November 2017 which related to Mr Salmond’s alleged behaviour at Edinburgh Airport had left her with a “feeling of unease”.

She said she was made aware that either Mr Salmond or his lawyer had been contacting people in the civil service following that query being raised.

Ms Sturgeon told the committee: “I can’t put this any more firmly than I’m about to put it to you and I’m sorry about that. That, and the way that was raised with me, just led to a sense of unease that that, him phoning, or these phone calls – whether they were from him or his lawyer – had stirred something, kind of poked a hornets’ nest.

“I didn’t have knowledge of specific complaints, but I, it wasn’t something I thought about every day, it wasn’t something I lay awake at night at that point worrying about. But I had a lingering suspicion that there just might be something in the ether, in the undergrowth that might surface.”

She also said that her recollection of her meeting with Mr Salmond’s former chief of staff Geoff Aberdein on March 29 2018 was “not as vivid as I wish it was”.

But she said that while she had “a general awareness” or a “suspicion” of a complaint about her predecessor, she did not have “knowledge” of it until April 2 when Mr Salmond showed her a letter he’d received from Permanent Secretary Leslie Evans informing him of the complaints against him.

She said: “Ahead of April 2, I had an awareness there was a complaint, no doubt I had suspicions of what the nature of what that might be, but that’s what it was: a general awareness, a suspicion that no doubt I had all sorts of theories for in my head.

“But it was reading the Permanent Secretary’s letter that he showed me on April 2 that gave me the knowledge and the detail behind that knowledge of all the things I have spoken about.”