Brexit campaigns in spotlight as data abuse watchdog widens hunt
BRITAIN’S data watchdog could extend its probe into the Cambridge Analytica scandal to Brexit campaigners.
Information commissioner Elizabeth Denham has already put questions to Ukip donor Arron Banks, who headed the Leave.EU campaign.
The Mail on Sunday has established that the probe into the misuse of Facebook data is likely to be widened to cover both Leave.EU and the official Vote Leave campaign.
Commission officials carried out a seven-hour search of Cambridge Analytica’s London HQ yesterday, driving away in a van carrying evidence.
Cambridge Analytica and Leave.EU were introduced to each other by barrister Matthew Richardson, when he was Ukip party secretary.
Mr Banks said the relationship turned sour when Leave.EU switched from Cambridge Analytica to its own social media gurus, after it failed to be named the official Leave campaign. Mr Banks refused to pay Cambridge Analytica for the work they had done because he regarded it as a ‘pitch’ rather than an agreed contract.
He said that when he joined Ukip leader Nigel Farage on a visit to newly elected Donald Trump in 2016, he was approached by Mr Richardson and asked to pay up.
Mr Banks, whose wife Katya is Russian, said: ‘Richardson does legal work for Cambridge Analytica, which is why he was pushing their case on us. But I didn’t appreciate being doorstepped at Trump Tower.’ He added that he had responded to Information Commission questions. Yesterday, Brittany Kaiser, Cambridge Analytica’s former business development director, said the work with Leave.EU had involved ‘at least six or seven meetings’ and centred on analysis of data provided by Ukip. The official Vote Leave campaign spent £3.9 million targeting voters through AggregateIQ (AIQ), a company closely linked with Cambridge Analytica. Christopher Wylie – the former Cambridge Analytica employee who first blew the whistle – revealed that he was also a central figure in setting up AIQ. He described it as the ‘Canadian office’. AIQ has also built software and databases for Cambridge Analytica. AIQ founder Zack Massingham ran Vote Leave’s social media operation.
The strategy was once explained by Tory MEP Daniel Hannan, who spoke of astrophysicists ‘who had found this way of scraping data off people’s Google searches and feeding it into a program to tell you, by postcode, where your voters were and exactly how committed they were. The physicists and the Canadians would help Vote Leave get back in the game’.
Mr Massingham built up a target audience from people who had ‘liked’ eurosceptic websites and Facebook pages.
Vote Leave’s strategy was a last-ditch digital marketing splurge. They gave £625,000 to student Darren Grimes, 23, for his social media-led campaign called BeLeave.
The money was spent with AIQ – and would breach Vote Leave’s £7million spending limit if the Electoral Commission were to establish that campaign chiefs had told Grimes to spend it with them.
Mr Richardson declined to respond to Mr Banks’s claims.