Mercer’s Attachment to Leave.EU Questioned; Trump’s Donor

Electoral Commission urged to investigate Farage’s Brexit campaign | The Guardian |

The Electoral Commission has been urged to investigate whether Nigel Farage’s Brexit campaign broke election law by not declaring the role of a firm of “psychographic” social media strategists used by Donald Trump.

Ahead of the EU referendum, Leave.EU was advised by Cambridge Analytica (CA), a company hired by Trump which uses artificial intelligence to personalise political messages according to the things voters say and “like” on Facebook. But Leave.EU, which was largely funded by UKIP donor Arron Banks, did not declare CA’s role to the Electoral Commission, according to filings for the campaign published last week.

Stephen Kinnock, a pro-remain Labour MP, has asked the UK’s elections and referendums regulator to urgently “investigate whether it breached provisions in the Political Parties Elections and Referendums Act 2000“.

“The market rate for a donation of this kind could amount to hundreds of thousands of pounds, based on the previous experience of referendum campaigns and political parties for analytical tools,” Kinnock told Claire Bassett, Electoral Commission chief executive, in a letter seen by the Guardian. “Yet Leave.eu has not declared this donation-in-kind at any point in their returns to the Electoral Commission.”

Any substantial additional spending between 15 April last year and the referendum on 23 June would have pushed Leave.EU over the spending limit for the regulated period. They were allowed by law to spend up to £700,000 but according to the accounts they filed they spent £693,000.

CA is backed by Robert Mercer, a billionaire Trump donor, whose daughter Rebekah [Mercer] was part of the White House transition team. He reportedly invested $10m in the rightwing news website Breitbart.

Kinnock questioned Leave.EU’s involvement in “a set of arrangements with a company that seems to be backed by a foreign billionaire and with contributions being made that are not being declared.”

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