Legal trouble ahead for the Tories?

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Legal trouble ahead for the Tories?

By Mark Pack | Sun 11th March 2007 - 1:27 pm

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Buried at the end of today’s report in The Independent about the cash for honours police investigation is this paragraph:

A senior figure close to the probe said the issue of whether both main political parties broke the law by hiding donations as “loans” was still “live”.

The Conservatives have quite a lot of form on, shall we say, dancing around the rules about declaring donations and have been keeping the police and regulators very busy with a series of wheezes.

They includes taking large loans and then doing their best to keep them secret, taking money from foreign firms with only ultra-minimal information about who the firms are or who is behind them, their use of more than one “front company” in a way that means the original donors don’t have to be declared and then there are their unusual property transactions.

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5 Comments

Gordon Greige 12th Mar '07 - 12:05pm

Oh come on.

Michael Brown?

5th Avenue Partners?

Kettles and black?
Paul 12th Mar '07 - 4:24pm

Electoral Commission cleared the LibDems of any wrongdoing. This is totally different.
Anonymous 12th Mar '07 - 9:50pm

Gordon,

There’s a massiver difference. The Lib Dem innocently accepted a donation from someone later shown to be guilty of a passport offence.

The Conservatives have systematically taken steps to disguise donations they have received, which if you read PPERA, is a crime.
Gordon Greige 13th Mar '07 - 10:50am

I suppose we shall have to wait and hear which party has to hand the money back before we will know the truth.
Brown's Money 13th Mar '07 - 1:23pm

Even if the electoral commission were to decide that the money needed to be paid back it wouldn’t mean there was any wrong-doing on the Lib Dems’ part. It took the courts/police a lot of investigating time to decide that he’d done anything at all wrong.