EU Referendum


UKIP: Times attack day number three


17/04/2014



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On the third day of the assault on the Farage Party by The Times, we are witnessing an interesting media phenomenon. Single-handedly, a national newspaper is setting out to destroy – or at least gravely damage – a prominent political party.

For the moment, it seems the rest of the legacy media is content to sit on its hands and watch The Times and UKIP slug it out, the idleness in part enforced by wholesale threats of intervention by Carter Fuck, and the inherent caution of post-Leveson editorial policy.

There is a sense that the beast is not yet mortally wounded, so the hyenas are circling the prey, not sufficiently emboldened to move in for the kill. The effect, though, has been drastically to reduce the volume of stories featuring UKIP, and to cut off the supply of Farage puffs.

That said, the hostile publicity is doubtless having an effect, with the latest offering headed: "What happened to the £287,000 donated to Farage’s local branch?".

The question is genuine. The newspaper has been made aware of almost £300,000 in UKIP party donations having been paid in to Nigel Farage's local branch and withdrawn as unspecified "other costs". There could, of course, be perfectly innocent explanations for this and, to the brainwashed cultists (#cultofFarage), the mere assurances of TGL are sufficient to support a belief of rectitude.

The more cynical and world-weary, however, are less easily convinced. UKIP insiders, for instance, have repeatedly raised concerns over £287,734 spent by the party's southeast branch in 2004 and 2005 – a fortune compared with the funds in other branches which struggle to meet even basic expenses in the hundreds.

In detail, The Times is looking at a company called Ashford Employment Ltd, a company owned by Mr Bown, UKIP's biggest donor, and run by UKIP. It  was set up in October 2003 to pay for call centre workers collecting donations from UKIP supporters, spending £158,582 in 2004 and £89,456 in 2005 in operating costs.

Once staff and the running costs had been met from donations, the surplus from Ashford was transferred to the Farage's southeast branch, according to Terry Quarterman, the centre's former manager and a director of the company. The branch received £291,931 in donations in 2004, the year of the European elections, and £114,967 in 2005, although it is unclear how much was from Ashford.

Former UKIP members have raised concerns about the two large sums that were paid out of the branch in the same two years. In 2004, the branch recorded a £211,267 withdrawal as "other" running costs. In 2005, £89,996 was spent in the same way. Late in 2005, the call centre's financial affairs were transferred to UKIP's head office.

What is especially suspicious is that the money was transferred to Farage's branch – over which he had complete control, and not to head office for distribution to the national branch network. And, in the hands of Farage, it was not used for campaigning, communications, property rental, utilities or auditing. In the accounts filed with the Electoral Commission, the spending is described only as "other running costs". Even though the accounts itemised payments for as little as £496 on communications, they offered no explanation of how these much larger sums were spent.

In the years after this suspicious spike in expenditure, total branch running costs amounted to no more than £8,200, clearly indicating the exceptional nature of the costs. 

If in any commercial business, unusually large sums started flowing through the accounts, without any information on where the money was going or what it was being spent on, suspicions would quite reasonably raised – especially as the money, collected from members nationally, should have been distributed nationally.

In a political party, and especially one supposedly committed to openness, full details of expenditure should have been given and, in the absence of such detail, it is not at all unreasonable that questions should be asked. When those questions were met with a wall of silence, and persistence was then greeted by sustained aggression, the very obvious and reasonable question was: "What have you got to hide?". Furthermore, Farage and his supporters can hardly complain if people try to fill the gaps with speculation. 

What we do know then takes on greater significance, and through The Times the wider pubic (or some of it) is told that these unexplained withdrawals came as UKIP was channelling national donations generated by the "controversial" call centre in Ashford, Kent, directly into the southeast branch.

This had started off as a fundraising operation, set up in mid-2003 in an office provided free by Alan Bown. Farage himself is on the record as claiming that it raised at least £400,000 and boosted the membership of the fledgeling party.

Understandably, UKIP officials who started seeing this flow of money started asking questions. Martin Haslam, the treasurer at UKIP's southeast branch in 2005, described the call centre as an operation "where money went in and no one quite knew what happened to it".

Such was the concern about the call centre's finances that in 2006, a group of UKIP members in the south east commissioned a corporate due diligence company to examine the centre's business structure. A partial copy of the initial report, obtained by The Times, indicates that concerns were raised about "a lack of transparency regarding the set-up and continuing operation of Ashford Employment Ltd".

There were also questions raised about he company history of John Moran, one of the centre's founders, the outcome being that the report called for an independent auditor to perform a full audit. This was never done, further strengthening suspicions that things were amiss.

To this day, there have been no satisfactory (or any) explanations of what happened to the money and now it is known that very large sums were passed to a branch under the total control of Farage, for which there are no details as to the eventual destination of the money.

It would have been very easy for Farage to have provided independently audited accounts, certifying where and how the money had been spent. His refusal to do so, combined with his aggression against anyone who asks perfectly reasonable questions, tells its own story.

For my part, on this blog, I really have better things to do with my time than chart these apparent misdeeds, but I – like many others concerned with the conduct and performance of UKIP – cannot stand idly by as the party seems to become more and more the private fiefdom of Mr Farage and, it would appear, his personal piggy bank.

Still to come are some very strange tales of offshore bank accounts in the Caymans, Farage's unexplained disappearances when he was supposed to be in Strasbourg but had in fact hopped over the border, to spend days at a time on "private" business in Geneva, relying on free passage with his MEP's diplomatic passport.

Thus, those who believe that this is merely a "plot" organised by Conservative HQ could not be more wrong. If that was the case, we would be dealing with the same sort of low calibre of people who were involved in rigging the IEA "Brexit" competition. If they were behind this, you would see their clumsy bootprints all over the terrain.

What we have here is altogether far more considered, amounting to a search for what is looking like fraud on an industrial scale. And until Farage comes clean, instead of unleashing the attack dogs on his critics, the questions are not going to go away.

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