The “Vote Leave” campaign was the official face of the 2016 effort to convince the United Kingdom to leave the European Union — an effort that succeeded. “Leave” won nearly 52 percent of the vote in the contentious Brexit referendum that year, and Britain is slated to leave the E.U. next March.
But on Tuesday, the Electoral Commission, an independent watchdog group, said it had found “significant evidence” that Vote Leave broke British electoral law. The commission said the group did not properly declare the extent of its coordination with BeLeave, a pro-Brexit youth group; by spending about $887,000 through BeLeave, Vote Leave thus overspent its legal $9.2 million limit. That money allegedly went to Aggregate IQ, a Canadian digital-marketing firm.
The commission’s findings came with fines: roughly $26,270 for Darren Grimes, the founder of BeLeave, and $80,000 for Vote Leave. Both Grimes and Vote Leave campaigner David Halsall have also been referred to the police for allegedly filing false reports about their campaign spending.
In a statement posted on Twitter, Grimes said he is “shocked and disappointed by the Electoral Commission and their behaviour.”
“Politicians say they want young people to engage with politics,” he wrote. “I was 22 when I got involved in a referendum I felt passionately about. I did nothing wrong.”
Vote Leave said in a statement that the commission’s report “contains a number of false accusations and incorrect assertions that are wholly inaccurate and do not stand up to scrutiny.”
But Bob Posner, director of political finance at the Electoral Commission, said his organization had “found substantial evidence that the two groups worked to a common plan, did not declare their joint working and did not adhere to the legal spending limits.”
Did overspending actually affect the outcome of the Brexit vote? That will be difficult to determine. But Shahmir Sanni, a Vote Leave campaigner-turned-whistle-blower told the BBC that the additional money “can make all the difference.”
As The Washington Post’s William Booth and Karla Adam reported in March, “Sanni said he and Grimes were based in the Vote Leave headquarters; were advised by Vote Leave staffers, including [Prime Minister Theresa] May’s now-senior adviser; and relied on Vote Leave’s attorney, who helped them incorporate the BeLeave group.”
