There has been a lot of stuff in the newspapers recently that I haven't really covered, about the two Leave Campaigns and the way they were run. I think we always suspected there were a lot of dirty tricks and Aaron Banks' book: The bad boys of Brexit, Tales of Mischief, Mayhem and Guerrilla Warfare in the EU more or less admits it.
But as time has passed a lot of stuff has come out about funding, the sources of it and the total amount spent. It is easy to get mixed up because there were two campaigns. Vote Leave was the official one with government money behind it but Aaron Banks and Nigel Farage had an unofficial one called Leave.EU.
Both have questions to answer. Vote Leave face an investigation by the Electoral Commission who have now released details of some of the issues (HERE). They had a spending limit of £7m but towards the end had a surplus of money. Apparently, it is not illegal to divert money to other campaigns provided they are separate and there is no coordination between them. This is my understanding. However, emails have been released showing they handed over £625,000 to a 23 year old student a few days before the vote, to pay for a digital campaign managed by a small Canadian company, Aggregate IQ. They show Vote Leave paid £400,000 directly to Aggregate IQ, a company they were already using, a day after the student asked for it. A few days later another £180,000 was paid 22 minutes after he asked for it and again directly to AIQ.
This looks like coordination to me but let's see what the Electoral Commission conclude.
It also seems Steve Baker MP, now a minister at DEXEU, but at the time working for the Vote Leave campaign, was behind the plan to exceed the spending limits. In an email of February 2016 he set this out (HERE). The Electoral Commission at first accepted there was no case to answer but under pressure from The Good Law Project have reopened it because of what they call "new evidence".
And Aaron Banks Leave.EU is facing another investigation into how he funded the majority of Leave.EU's money, amounting to about £9m in donations and loans (HERE). There are doubts if this was actually his own money. By all accounts he was in financial trouble in 2013 but had miraculously recovered a year later to splash money on Leave.EU and diamond mines, chemical companies as well as investing millions in wealth management companies. It really beggars belief that an obscure insurance company owner from Bristol should feel so strongly anti-EU that he was prepared to spend £9m of his own money to win a referendum.That's a lot of money after all.
And there remains the £435,000 donation to the DUP who spend it on pro Brexit advertising in London. The source of the money is still a mystery. It came from a body called The Constitutional Research Council run by Richard Cook a former vice chairman of the Scottish Conservatives. Where he got the money from is not known.
So we now know the Leave campaigns lied (£350 million a week, Turkey joining the EU, etc) and we know from the US investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election that Russian trolls used social media campaigning (HERE) to spread pro Brexit messages in the UK. We suspect that the Vote Leave campaign illegally overspent by diverting money to a 23 year old student and a veterans organisation in the days before the referendum.
We suspect they received unpaid support from a company called Cambridge Analytica (HERE) although the company now deny it (HERE).
And there are claims that, contrary to the law prohibiting the two campaigns from being coordinated, there were links between the data company Aggregate IQ used by Vote Leave, and Cambridge Analytica used by Leave.EU.
It is all very murky and it will be fascinating to see what happens.
