Brexit Party Donations - An Open Invitation to Launder Money

[Denzil_DC]

“It couldn’t be less secure” is Turlough Conway’s conclusion as he looks at Nigel Farage’s “Never seen anything like it” claim of mass donations to his new party.

During the EU referendum campaign in 2016 multiple fines for data misuse and overspending were brought against Nigel Farage’s Leave.EU campaign and it was referred to the Met Police and National Crime Agency (NCA) for electoral wrongdoing. Given this background, it would have seemed logical for the Brexit Party to ensure that its funding and data campaigns were as open and transparent as possible.

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With notable exceptions, it’s remarkable how little interest the media has taken in the Brexit Party. The concept was seeded in August 2016 when Brexit Party domains were bought by West Dorset UKIP. When Farage launched his party on 12 April this year he claimed that, during the preceding 10 days, it had amassed funding at record rates through its website – £750,000, all in small donations of less than £500, he said.



Farage’s mentioning that the “small sums” were all less than £500 seemed unnecessary and stood out. But it is significant in terms of electoral funding law.

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Conclusions for Electoral Law

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"This is a red flag for the kind of transactional laundering that the Electoral Commission warned of: multiple, small, anonymous donations from one large donor."

Clearly a Political funding act nearly 20 years old cannot be fit for purpose in the digital age. In 2019, only suspicious transactions have faint or invisible traces and there is no reason why data on all contributions should not be comprehensive and available to the Electoral Commission on request.

https://bylinetimes.com/2019/05/14/brexit-party-donations-an-open-invitation-to-launder-money/

There's too much detail in this article to be able to summarize it sensibly within DU's paragraph allowance. Conway shows how the Brexit "Party" website's donations and registration systems are open to abuse.

Leading anti-Brexit QC Jolyon Maugham agrees that there's cause for concern:

Link to tweet

Jo Maugham QC ✔
@JolyonMaugham

Some compelling points made here by @Turloughc about how, it would seem, @brexitparty_uk has set out to create an architecture that is receptive to impermissible and/or dark donations. https://bylinetimes.com/2019/05/14/brexit-party-donations-an-open-invitation-to-launder-money/ …

In a Twitter thread, author Carol Hedges took a closer look at how the Brexit "Party" is set up:

Link to tweet

carol hedges @carolJhedges

🇬🇧Did You Know? 1.🇪🇺
You cannot become a member of The Brexit Party; you can become a registered supporter but not a member (check out their website if you don’t believe me), Yes, it’s a political party but what you may not know is that it’s also a private company ...#brexit

carol hedges @carolJhedges

🇪🇺Did You Know? 2🇬🇧
Farage has right to“directly or indirectly, to appoint or remove a majority of the board of directors of the company” It’s a company limited by shares (http://bit.ly/brexit-party-articles …), which means that the directors can take any profit out of the company.

Link to tweet

carol hedges
‏@carolJhedges

🇪🇺Did You Know? 3🇬🇧 By the way, the other director is Richard Tice (https://badboysofbrexit.com/2018/01/16/richard-tice/ …), CEO of a £500m asset management group. Men of the people, eh?
#leavemeansleave

Link to tweet

carol hedges @carolJhedges

🇬🇧Did You Know? 4🇪🇺Nigel Farage is answerable to nobody, and that includes his party’s supporters.
Is Ex public schoolboy, ex Tory, ex commodities broker, and self-appointed representative of the working classes of this great country of ours mugging his supporters off?

Link to tweet

carol hedges @carolJhedges

🇬🇧Did You Know? 5🇪🇺
Who made #Farage leader of The Brexit Party? He did. Remember, it hasn’t got any members, just supporters – there’s no-one to question him and he isn’t accountable to anybody. Would you support a party where just one person made all the decisions? #Brexit

Link to tweet

carol hedges @carolJhedges

🇪🇺Did You Know? 6🇬🇧
So, next week, just think before you put your X in The Brexit Party box. Nigel Farage Moneymaker European Tour is nothing but a private business and all you’re doing is putting money directly into his pocket.
Your choice. But does he care about you?
Hell no!

In the Twitter thread, some people point out similarities in the structure and funding of Italy's Five Star Movement, founded by Beppe Grillo.

Current electoral law seems ill suited to coping with the privatization of politics in this way. It almost seems as if right-wing forces in Europe have been sharing tips ...

[Denzil_DC]

1. Some related gleanings from around the Web about the Brexit "Party"

They concern the strong influence of the Koch Brothers-funded rightist-libertarian Spiked Online and its roots in the Revolutionary Communist Party, including a number of Spiked staff standing on MEP lists, and how the Brexit "Party" morphed from the shambles that conducted a poorly attended march on Westminster a month or so ago to a relatively slick campaign with strong production values:

FOX BREAKS COVER - From Revolutionary Communist To Farage's Right Hand Woman

Otto English on the weird moral maze of would-be MEP Claire Fox and her Spiked network.

Nigel Farage’s Brexit party is leading the polls for the EU elections and, given the party has no manifesto, policies or coherent strategy for leaving the EU, that’s some achievement. It seems that our political discourse is now so irredeemably f*cked that voting for a party with no actual policies in order to elect MEPs to a parliament they don’t believe in is just fine and dandy.

As Farage paraded his candidates for the adoring media, one in particular caught my eye. There – in amongst the Rees-Moggs and middle-aged millionaires was Claire Fox – known to Radio 4 listeners as a talking head on the Moral Maze.

Fox is currently director of the ‘think tank’ the Institute of Ideas, but for two decades she was a core figure in the Revolutionary Communist Party and the co-publisher of its in-house magazine, Living Marxism. Neither Fox nor the Brexit Party attempted to deny that, but I wonder whether rank-and-file Brexiters planning to vote for Ms Fox know quite what they are getting.

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Bust as Living Marxism – Reborn as Spiked

Since 1997, the group has rebranded. LM – now known as Spiked – thrives online and its editor, Brendan O’Neill, has increasingly cosied up to the Brexit Establishment while accepting $300k from the Charles Koch Foundation. Claire Fox writes for the magazine intermittently, while trotting out libertarian stances including, allegedly, the view that Gary Glitter had a right to download child pornography. Her self-styled ‘Institute of Ideas’ (which had to rename itself the ‘Academy of Ideas’) has served as a hub for the LM network which includes Brexit: the Movie maker Martin Durkin and others.

https://bylinetimes.com/2019/04/24/fox-breaks-cover-from-revolutionary-communist-to-farages-right-hand-woman/

AstroTurfers of Britain Part Two: Who is Behind Brexit Party Recruitment and its PR Makeover?

Otto English delves deeper into Claire Fox and Spiked Online‘s close connection to Nigel Farage’s new party, and discovers another PR executive involved in recruiting potential MEPs.

It seems just a few short weeks ago that we were howling at its laugh-a-minute ‘March for Leave’ and low-tech website. How did it turn from an amateurish outfit into an undeniably slick operation – with a superior launch video and a festival-style roadshow touring the country? And, on that journey, why has Nigel Farage stuck so steadfastly by Claire Fox, the only weak link in the chain?

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It started with Claire Fox. To grasp why her past membership of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) remains so relevant, and why people like me keep banging on about it, you have to first understand that the RCP never actually went away.

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The group had always excelled at astroturfing – magnifying their message across the political fringes via front organisations and pop-up publications and, if anything changed with the demise of the RCP, it was only that, with time, the Living Marxism alumni simply got much better at it.

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For such a small group, the Spiked network is remarkably well-represented on the Brexit Party candidate list and it is quite possible that Katon has been ransacking her contacts book. In addition to her client Claire Fox, Katon’s colleague David Bull who spoke at a Spiked event in 2003, is also standing for the party in the North West.

https://bylinetimes.com/2019/05/13/astroturfers-of-britain-part-two-who-is-behind-brexit-party-recruitment-and-its-pr-makeover/

Twitter user Bob from Brockley posted a useful roundup of similar concerns:

Link to tweet

Bob From Brockley @bobfrombrockley

A short thread about Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party candidates from Spiked (Claire Fox & Alka Cuthbert - also active in the Full Brexit pressure group), their Northern Ireland backstory, and the crapness of our media:

(Click on the tweet to access the thread - it's too long to excerpt here in the time I can spare today.)

A few thoughts:

Some of our American friends on DU seem very keen to jump to the conclusion that Putin's behind our current travails, when the role of the American right/libertarian movement is all too apparent. The involvement of one doesn't discount the other, but we can draw clear lines of influence and profit between the vulture capitalists (including the current US president) who're only too eager to pick over the UK's bones post-Brexit and arch-Brexiters in the UK political scene.

The Euro elections are weird. The expectation is that those elected will only be in post for a short while, if at all. That may mean that voters are less worried about the political hinterlands and quirks of some of the Brexit "Party" candidates, and more focused on piling in behind its bandwagon.

Turnout is the key factor. Farage's parties have in the past never done well in elections where the turnout has been around 40 per cent or over. Will these EU elections pull people to the polls more than they have in the past? And, obviously, if so, which ones ...?

[Denzil_DC]

2. Nigel Farage's Brexit Party ordered to check EVERY 25-pound donation for foreign cash

Nigel Farage's Brexit Party has been told to check all £2.5 million donated to it to ensure it hasn't accepted cash from foreign donors.

The Party will be required to satisfy itself that every single £25 'supporter' fee was not from an impermissible source.

If they can't, they'll have to either return it to the donor or hand it over to the Treasury.

The Electoral Commission last week confirmed the party’s online payment system put them at ‘high and ongoing risk’ of allowing overseas cash to be donated.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/nigel-farages-brexit-party-told-16536061