Aaron Banks' troubles are beginning to pile up. The Open Democracy website (HERE) has got hold of hundreds of emails that seem to show he lied to Damian Collins' Select Committee about staff at his insurance companies not working for the Leave.eu campaign, the one that he financed. So, not only are the National Crime Agency investigating where the money came from, more questions are being asked about what are essentially undeclared donations in kind.
Banks apparently regularly and consistently mixed Leave.eu and his own businesses, with workers being routinely directed to work on political activities with no record kept and no disclosure of the time and money spent. Banks categorically denied to the parliamentary Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee that any of his insurance companies employees worked on the referendum campaign check.
Open Democracy say, "Damian Collins, chair of parliament's inquiry into fake news and disinformation, said that the evidence appeared to "flatly contradict" what Banks told his committee in June and that Banks could have "deliberately misled the committee and parliament on an important point."
The Electoral Commission have already been looking into the way data was obtained and used and a report is due to be published this coming Tuesday which should be interesting.
"The relationship between Eldon, UKIP and Leave.EU is one of the focuses of an investigation by the Information Commissioner into the use of data in the referendum. The final report will be published on Tuesday and the ICO head, Elizabeth Denham, will answer MPs inquiry in a hearing of the DCMS committee".
I'm not sure if what the Electoral Commission were investigating covers the whistle blowers allegations or if they, or at least some of them, are new ones. They may contradict what Banks and senior employees at his Eldon Insurance company have already told the Commission. Who knows?
The allegations are from emails that have come from whistle "blowers" (note the plural) who worked at Banks’s Bristol headquarters during the Brexit vote so not easy to deny:
"Hundreds of emails leaked by former employees of Eldon Insurance and Rock Services to openDemocracy show insurance staff frequently working on the Leave campaign in the run-up to the 2016 referendum. Banks, who was referred to the National Crime Agency this week, repeatedly told MPs that his insurance businesses and his political campaigning were separate"
“If Eldon employees were being paid to work on the campaign, it should have been a declared expense. We asked him directly if he’d used his insurance employees to work on the campaigns and he said they didn’t,” Collins added.
"Under British electoral law, campaigns cannot co-ordinate or ‘work together' ".
I think there are also two more telling items in the Open Democracy report about the kind of information they were putting out and the reach they had:
Banks’s insurance staff were involved indirectly in the Brexit campaign, too. A few weeks before the Brexit vote, Banks invited a small group of insurance employees to view an anti-immigration video before it was posted on Leave.EU’s Facebook channel.
“One of them commented ‘it wasn’t informative enough’,” a former Leave.EU staffer recalled. “Banks said ‘it isn’t meant to be informative. It’s propaganda’.”
Banks openly admitted it was "propaganda" which is bad enough but also in another section they say:
"Without Leave.EU, according to Arron Banks, there would be no Brexit. In his autobiography, Banks claims that Leave.EU’s social media team was reaching almost 20 million people a week ahead of the 2016 referendum".
Lies and propaganda were reaching 20 million people a week ahead of the referendum. I think the calls for a much wider Mueller style investigation or a public inquiry into the whole referendum campaign will grow until they eventually become irresistible.
Finally, the Daily Mail (the irony!) a couple of days ago (HERE) printed a piece about Theresa May apparently blocking an enquiry into Banks:
"The Mail understands that in early 2016 the then home secretary Theresa May declined a request by one of the security services to investigate Banks- as the topic was simply too explosive in the run up to the referendum".
It might have been too explosive in early 2016 but if Mrs May thought she had diffused the problem she hasn't. If even a few of the main allegations against Bank's turn out to be true and she did block an enquiry into him the explosion will be heard the length and breadth of the nation and she will be in serious trouble. Think about it. She ran her own totally ineffectual low profile effort for remaining in the EU and was too timid to permit an enquiry into what may turn out to be the most corrupt campaign ever run in this country since the rotten boroughs were abolished. She then turned hard Brexiteer, in thrall to the ERG, and she has since led what will certainly turn out to be the most disastrous negotiations we have ever been involved in.
If were her I wouldn't count on a statue in parliament.
