Pressure grows on No campaign over donation

Darling defends £500,000 Taylor money

THE pro- union Better Together campaign is facing mounting pressure to return its largest donation, after it emerged that the businessman who gave it heads a company with a web of operations in tax havens.

The anti-independence group has been under fire from the SNP since it declared a week ago that it had accepted £500,000 from Ian Taylor, a Conservative Party backer who is president of the world’s largest oil trader, Vitol.

Accounting for almost half the £1.1 million given to Better Together since its launch last June, the donation came after Taylor met the campaign’s leader, former Labour Chancellor Alistair Darling.

Darling yesterday broke cover and spoke out in defence of Taylor. He also said Better Together would be keeping the donation.

Although the donation was legal, the SNP has urged Better Together to return it on ethical grounds because of controversial Vitol activities in Serbia, Iran, Iraq and Libya.

Financial statements filed in Luxembourg last month by a key Vitol company, Vitol Holding II SA, revealed multiple operations in tax havens. Covering the year to December 31, 2011, when Vitol Holding II SA recorded a pre-tax profit of $2 billion, the Consolidated Financial Statements list 90 companies and 100%- owned subsidiaries which comprise the “Vitol Group”.

Of these, 23 were in well-known tax havens: 16 in Bermuda, five in the British Virgin Islands, one in Panama, and one (90% owned), in the Arab Emirate of Fujairah.

One subsidiary is Pipsa Energy (Bermuda) Ltd. Ex-Labour MP and energy minister Brian Wilson was a paid adviser to Pipsa in 2004-05.

Vitol has previously admitted paying £1m to the Serbian warlord Arkan in the 1990s to expedite an oil deal, but insists it broke no laws. Arkan was responsible for crimes including directing ethnic cleansing and murder during the Yugoslavian wars before his death in 2000.

In 2007, Vitol pled guilty to grand