Lib Dems fined, DUP get away with "Dark Money" payments.

I am surprisingly sympathetic to the announcement that  Liberal Democrats have been fined £18,000 for breaching campaign spending rules during last year’s Brexit referendum, the elections watchdog because there seems to be double standards at force here.


The majority of the fine was for failing to provide acceptable invoices or receipts for 80 payments worth more than £80,000, the Electoral Commission said.
The Britain Stronger in Europe official campaign to Remain in the EU, which has become Open Britain, was also fined £1,250 for failing to deliver a complete and accurate spending return.

Bob Posner, Electoral Commission director of political finance and regulation, said: “The reporting requirements for parties and campaigners at referendums and elections are clear, that’s why it is disappointing that the Liberal Democrats didn’t follow them correctly.

Because at the same time  the  Northern Ireland Secretary James Brokenshire is going to try to sneak a big favour to the DUP, the small party now propping up May’s government in parliament – and in effect holding the future of Britain, Ireland and Europe hostage.

 As campaigner Alan Ramsay points out,

Hoping that journalists and MPs will be too hung-over after yet another Christmas party to pay much attention to a new legislative detail, Brokenshire has chosen the quiet moment before the break to smuggle through a measure which will deny British citizens the right to know who funds their politics. And in particular, it will block all of us from knowing who gave the DUP a highly controversial £435,000 donation to campaign for Brexit last year.

Of course, that’s not what Brokenshire says he’s doing. Listen to his speeches, and you’d believe that his parliamentary order – which comes before a specially convened committee of 17 MPs today – is designed to deliver long-awaited transparency on political donations to the people of Northern Ireland.

In a sense, it will. Unlike in the rest of the UK, donors can give any amount of money to political parties in Northern Ireland and still keep their names secret. Brokenshire’s move will change this.

But here’s the catch. The Northern Ireland Secretary wants to make the new transparency rules effective 1st July 2017 – when in fact, a law was passed three years ago which would have allowed donors to be publicly named from 1st January 2014.

This timing is crucial. If Brokenshire was granting transparency from 2014, it would mean revealing who gave the DUP the mystery £435,000 – the largest donation ever received by a Northern Irish party, which was spent on lavish pro-Brexit campaigning in the weeks before the tightly-fought EU referendum vote.

This matters to citizens across the UK because almost none of this secret donation was spent in Northern Ireland. In fact, much of the cash was used to fund expensive wrap around adverts in the Metro freesheet in major cities on the mainland.

In effect, the DUP laundered a huge sum of cash for someone who wanted to bankroll the Leave campaign across the UK, and abused an out of date Northern Irish loophole to keep their identity a secret. And now Theresa May’s government is cleaning up after them.

Everyone will deny, of course, that this has anything to do with the squalid £1bn deal the Conservatives made with the DUP in May this year, in order to keep May’s government in power.

Asked in July why there weren’t granting transparency from 2014, the Northern Ireland office said to Channel 4 that James Brokenshire “does not believe that it is right or fair to impose retrospective regulations on people who donated in accordance with the rules set out in law at the time”.

But the reality is that the 2014 Act made clear that all donations from then on would one day be public. Talk to people in Northern Ireland, and they are clear: the assumption was always that one day, all details held by the Electoral Commission about donations from 2014 onward would one day be published. This is what the donors expected, it’s what the parties expected, and it’s what the public had demanded.

Brokenshire’s move also has involved ignoring all the people the government would normally consult on such an important decision.

There is one thing that the 2014 Act specifies. It says that the Secretary of State must “consult the Electoral Commission” before making donors details public.

The head of the Northern Irish Electoral Commission, Ann Watt, has made it unequivocally clear that she thinks information about donors from 2014 onwards should be published, saying: "While all reportable donations and loans received from 1 July 2017 will now be published by the commission, we would also like to see the necessary legislation put in place, as soon as possible, to allow us to publish details of donations and loans received since January 2014.”

Her predecessor Séamus Magee retired in 2014, and so is freer to say what he really thinks. At the time, he Tweeted: “The deal on party donations and loans must be part of the DUP/Conservative deal. No other explanation.”

“Every party in Northern Ireland understood that the publication of political donations over £7,500 was to be retrospective to Jan 2014.”

There is of course a understandable reason why donations to Political Parties  . Those who did so faced the possibility of becoming terrorist targets.

openDemocracy has learned that Sinn Fein, the SDLP, the Alliance Party, and the Greens have all told Brokenshire in writing or during talks that they want transparency on political donations backdated to 2014, thereby revealing the source of the DUP’s Brexit funding.”

“The Ulster Unionists have also told Brokenshire in private talks that they too do not oppose retrospective legislation and backed a consensus for the 2014 date.”

It has been suggested that the Dark Money came from an unusual source.

Fintan O’Toole  back in June wrote

To recap briefly: two days before the Brexit referendum last June, the Metrofreesheet in London and other British cities came wrapped in a four-page glossy propaganda supplement urging readers to vote Leave. Bizarrely, it was paid for by the DUP, even though Metro does not circulate in Northern Ireland. At the time, the DUP refused to say what the ads cost or where the money came from.

We’ve since learned that the Metro wraparound cost a staggering £282,000 (€330,000) – surely the biggest single campaign expense in the history of Irish politics. For context, the DUP had spent about £90,000 (€106,000) on its entire campaign for the previous month’s assembly elections. But this was not all: the DUP eventually admitted that this spending came from a much larger donation of £425,622 (€530,000) from a mysterious organisation, the Constitutional Research Council.

The mystery is not why someone seeking to influence the Brexit vote would want to do so through the DUP. Disgracefully, Northern Ireland is exempt from the UK’s requirements for the sources of large donations to be declared. The mystery, rather, is who were the ultimate sources of this money and why was it so important to keep their identities secret.

The Constitutional Research Council is headed by a Scottish conservative activist of apparently modest means, Richard Cook. It has no legal status, membership list or public presence and there is no reason to believe that Cook himself had half a million euro to throw around. But the DUP has been remarkably incurious about where the money ultimately came from. Peter Geoghegan (sometimes of this parish) and Adam Ramsay of the excellent openDemocracy website did some digging and what they’ve come up with is, to put it mildly, intriguing.

What they found is that Richard Cook has a history of involvement with a very senior and powerful member of the Saudi royal family, who also happens to have been a former director of the Saudi intelligence agency. In April 2013, Cook jointly founded a company called Five Star Investments with Prince Nawwaf bin Abdul Aziz al Saud. The prince, whose address is given as a royal palace in Jeddah, is listed on the company’s initial registration as the holder of 75 per cent of the shares. Cook had 5 per cent. The other 20 per cent of the shares belonged to a man called Peter Haestrup, a Danish national with an address in Wiltshire, whose own colourful history we must leave aside for reasons of space.

The Liberal Democrats have been heavily fined  (for them)   for what may have been a administrative error whilst the DUP who are propping up the government are getting away what many see as a form of money laundering.

There should be a Police investigation into the DUP Dark Money allegation and if it is proven then I believe more than a Fine however heavy should be considered.