Demands for law change to unmask €500k DUP donor

NORTHERN Ireland electoral law should be reformed to reveal the source of a £435,000 (€497,000) donation made to the DUP during the Brexit campaign, a damning UK government report has said.

The huge sum was donated to Arlene Foster’s party by the mysterious Constitutional Research Council, but a loophole in Northern Ireland electoral law – a hang-over from the Troubles – prevents the UK government from investigating the true source of the money.

Now a House of Commons committee has accused the CRC of ‘deliberately’ exploiting the loophole ‘to funnel money to the Democratic Unionist Party’.

‘We believe that, in order to avoid having to disclose the source of this £435,000 donation, the CRC, deliberately and knowingly, exploited a loophole in the electoral law to funnel money to the Democratic Unionist Party in Northern Ireland,’ the report states. ‘That money was used to fund pro-Brexit newspaper advertising outside Northern Ireland and to pay the Canadianbased data analytics company, Aggregate IQ.’

The CRC is an obscure prounionist group, chaired by Scottish Conservative Richard Cook, which has no website, publishes no accounts and does not reveal the names of its donors. The DUP did not respond to requests for comment on the ‘Disinformation and Fake News’ report findings.