The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Vote Leave chief hits out over alleged rule breach
Watchdog expected to find campaign overspent
The elections watchdog is expected to find that official Brexit campaign Vote Leave broke spending rules during the 2016 referendum.
The campaign group’s former chief executive, Matthew Elliott, said the Electoral Commission (EC) had concluded that Vote Leave exceeded spending limits by making a donation to another Brexit-backing group.
The campaign, which had support from senior Tories including Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, is expected to challenge the commission’s findings when they are officially produced.
Mr Elliott accused the EC of a “huge breach of natural justice”, alleging that the watchdog had not listened to Vote Leave’s version of events.
If found guilty of breaking electoral law, the campaign could face a hefty fine and anti-Brexit organisations could seize on the findings to boost their cause.
Mr Elliott told Sky News: “Their initial conclusion is that we have overspent, that a donation we made to another group during the course of the campaign was incorrect, we shouldn’t have made that donation.”
The EC said Vote Leave had taken an “unusual step” of going public with the findings of its draft report.
Allegations against the official Brexit campaign centre on a donation of almost £680,000 made by the campaign to a youth Brexit group called BeLeave.
It is alleged the money was actually used for the benefit of Vote Leave, to pay data firm Aggregate IQ for targeted messaging services.
If this cash was recorded as Vote Leave expenditure, it would take the campaign’s spending over the £7 million limit, raising the prospect that electoral law had been breached.
The allegations come from information provided by whistleblowers including Christopher Wylie and Shahmir Sanni.
Mr Wylie worked for Cambridge Analytica, the data firm at the centre of the Facebook privacy scandal, while Mr Sanni worked with Vote Leave.
Mr Elliott told Sky News: “(The EC) listened to these, quite frankly, marginal characters who came out in March, and listened to their stories, but haven’t had evidence from Vote Leave side of things.
“I think it is a huge breach of natural justice that they haven’t wanted to listen to our opinions and our story and we were the people running the campaign.”
In an interview with the BBC, he said: “I believe we acted both within the letter of the law and also the spirit of the law and the spirit of how you should conduct a campaign.”