Vote Leave fined, referred to police over spending rules breach
Electoral Commission finds evidence of coordination with BeLeave
The Brexit campaign group Vote Leave has been fined £61,000 and referred to the police for breaching spending rules in the 2016 referendum, Britain’s Electoral Commission said on Tuesday.
The commission said Vote Leave worked with the fellow pro-Brexit BeLeave and spent £675,000 to target voters through social media but under an undeclared common plan.
David Halsall, responsible for Vote Leave and of BeLeave founder Darren Grimes were both referred to the police. Grimes, who was a fashion student at the time, was also fined £20,000 after being found to have committed two offences.
Vote Leave exceeded its legal spending limit of £7m by almost £500,000 during the referendum campaign. The group also filed an incomplete and inaccurate spending report with £234,501 reported incorrectly, and invoices missing for a total of £12,849.99 of spending.
Vote Leave spent nearly £2.7m of its budget on the services of the Canadian digital marketing firm, Aggregate IQ. Another £675,315 was sent to Aggregate IQ by BeLeave.
After the referendum Grimes went on to work at the pro-Brexit lobbying website Brexitcentral where former Vote Leave chief executive Matthew Elliott is an editor. Grimes left in June and now works for the right-wing Institute of Economic Affairs, according to his own social media profile.
"We found substantial evidence that the two groups worked to a common plan, did not declare their joint working and did not adhere to the legal spending limits," said Bob Posner, the commission's director of political finance and regulation.
"Vote Leave has resisted our investigation from the start, including contesting our right as the statutory regulator to open the investigation. It has refused to cooperate, refused our requests to put forward a representative for interview, and forced us to use our legal powers to compel it to provide evidence."
"Nevertheless, the evidence we have found is clear and substantial, and can now be seen in our report."
In May the pro-Brexit group Leave.EU was fined £70,000 and its chief executive officer Liz Bilney referred to the Metropolitan police after similar breaches.
The commission said the group unlawfully exceeded its statutory spending limit by at least 10% and delivered incomplete and inaccurate spending and transaction returns. It also suggested the fine could have been higher but for a cap on how much it could impose.
The commission said there were reasonable grounds to suspect that she “knowingly or recklessly signed a false declaration accompanying the Leave.EU referendum spending return”.
Leave.EU failed to include at least £77,380 in its spending return, the commission said, adding that the unlawful over-spend "may well have been considerably higher than that".
(Additional reporting by Frank Prenesti)