Brexit campaign accused of cheating
LONDON: Two senior advisers to Prime Minister Theresa May might have conspired to bypass electoral spending laws when they were leading a campaign for Britain to leave the European Union, a former employee of their effort said this week, in an interview and in testimony he gave to the country’s elections regulator.
The allegations led to a heated exchange, conducted in the British news media, involving allegations of hard feelings over an old romance and of the deliberate outing by the prime minister’s office, No 10 Downing St, of the former employee as gay.
The former employee, Shahmir Sanni, said in the interview and in a witness statement submitted to the regulator, the Electoral Commission, that two advisers had funnelled more than $900,000 in campaign spending through a puppet organisation they had set up. They did so, he said, by paying the money to a digital advertising firm that was indirectly linked to the Trump campaign and also worked on the push to exit the European Union.
Mr Sanni volunteered at Vote Leave, the main campaign led in part by the two advisers to the prime minister, and then at the organisation that he now says was a puppet, called BeLeave.
The allegations are the latest of many raised on both sides of the referendum about the possible diversion of money through allied organisations to get around funding limits on each of them, and campaign finance experts said the multitude of such claims pointed to holes in the regulations that governed the referendum.
In response, one of the two Downing Street advisers, Stephen Parkinson, said that Vote Leave had adhered to all relevant laws. Mr Parkinson also suggested that Mr Sanni was lashing out because the two had “dated for 18 months, before splitting up — I thought amicably — in September 2017.”
He said he had not spoken to Mr Sanni as a supervisor from the Vote Leave campaign, but as a friend. “That is the capacity in which I gave Shahmir advice and encouragement, and I can understand if the lines became blurred for him,” Mr Stephenson said in the statement, “but I am clear that I did not direct the activities of any separate campaign groups.”
The other adviser, Cleo Watson, could not be reached for comment.
Mr Sanni’s allegations have come to light because of a tangle of connections to an online consulting company with ties to the campaign that elected President Donald Trump — Cambridge Analytica.
Mr Sanni is friends with Christopher Wylie, a former research director of Cambridge Analytica who has recently provided information to journalists indicating that the company improperly obtained the data of 50 million Facebook users to help target voters.
The Vote Leave campaign relied heavily for online ad placement on a Canadian company called AggregateIQ, which according to documents and testimony submitted to the Electoral Commission by Mr Wylie was a satellite business set up to support Cambridge Analytica.
Public filings also show that Vote Leave provided virtually the entire $990,000 budget of BeLeave — £625,000 (27.5 million baht) — which took the form of additional spending paid directly to AggregateIQ.
As Mr Wylie was coming forward with his disclosures about Cambridge Analytica, he encouraged his friend Mr Sanni to come forward with his claims about Vote Leave and BeLeave as well.
Testimony provided by Mr Wylie in his filing to the Electoral Commission show that AggregateIQ was founded in 2013 in discussion with executives at Cambridge Analytica’s parent company.