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SENIOR members of UKIP, including the party’s leader, have been caught telling a potential donor how to flout Electoral Commission rules to give up to £100,000 in secret to its general election campaign funds.
Stuart Agnew, a Euro-MP, described a series of ruses to conceal the identity of a donor at a meeting with an undercover reporter.
In a subsequent conversation, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, the UKIP leader, confirmed that the donor’s name would not come out.
“Yes, we did it in the European elections [in 2009],” he said. “We passed on £80,000 from one person in effect ... and that caused no difficulty at all.”
The use of proxies to conceal the identify of a political donor caused a scandal in 2007 that blew Gordon Brown’s premiership off course and prompted a criminal investigation.
Agnew told the undercover reporter, who was posing as the niece of a publicity-shy party supporter, how her aunt could give her a non-repayable loan of £100,000 which could then be passed to UKIP.
He said she could otherwise make a donation of up to £25,000 to UKIP via an unincorporated association such as Global Britain, which is run by Pearson.
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