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
Oh come on.
Michael Brown?
5th Avenue Partners?
Kettles and black?
Electoral Commission cleared the LibDems of any wrongdoing. This is totally different.
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.
I suppose we shall have to wait and hear which party has to hand the money back before we will know the truth.
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.