More dirty doings from tommies DUP
2 days before the Referendum, the DUP bought a Metro newspaper wraparound which cost a staggering £282,000 – surely the biggest single campaign expense in the history of Irish politics - urging British voters to vote Leave. Where did that money come from?
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/what-connects-brexit-the-dup-dark-money-and-a-saudi-prince-1.3083586#.W_K_akuYGHE.twitter
To recap briefly: two days before the Brexit referendum last June, the
Metro freesheet in London and other British cities came wrapped in a four-page glossy propaganda supplement urging readers to vote Leave. Bizarrely, it was paid for by the DUP,
even though Metro does not circulate in Northern Ireland. At the time, the DUP refused to say what the ads cost or where the money came from.
We’ve since learned that the
Metro wraparound cost a staggering £282,000 (€330,000) – surely the biggest single campaign expense in the history of Irish politics. For context, the DUP had spent about £90,000 (€106,000) on its entire campaign for the previous month’s assembly elections. But this was not all: the DUP eventually admitted that this spending came from a much larger donation of £425,622 (€530,000) from a mysterious organisation, the
Constitutional Research Council.
Mystery
The mystery is not why someone seeking to influence the Brexit vote would want to do so through the DUP. Disgracefully, Northern Ireland is exempt from the UK’s requirements for the sources of large donations to be declared. The mystery, rather, is who were the ultimate sources of this money and why was it so important to keep their identities secret.
On a personal note I wonder who is still paying this little gang of political Muggers to make trouble at Westminster and how much more Dark money is going their way?