Vote Leave found guilty of exceeding spending limit by Electoral Commission

Campaign worked with BeLeave and Veterans for Britain to funnel money to Aggregate IQ in contravention of electoral law

The Electoral Commission announced today that the Vote Leave, Veterans for Britain and BeLeave campaigns broke electoral law. It fined the organisations accordingly.

The announcement came at the end of a nine-month investigation into the way that the separate Brexit campaigns were funded, including payments to Aggregate IQ a subsidiary of billionaire US Robert Mercer's SCL and sister company of Cambridge Analytica.

The Commission found evidence that Vote Leave had made payments to Aggregate IQ in the run up to the referendum on behalf of BeLeave and Veterans for Britain. Under UK law it is illegal for individual campaigns to work together in this way.

The Commission noted that BeLeave exceeded its spending limit of £7m by £500,000 in part by by channelling money to DataIQ via BeLeave. BeLeave exceeded its spending limit of £10,000 by more than £666,000 and the regulator found that all the campaigns had failed to provide adequate records of their spending.

Vote Leave was fined £61,000, Darren Grimes, head of BeLeave £20,000 and Veterans for Britain £250.

"We conducted a thorough and fair investigation. We requested and received evidence from a range of individuals and sources, including from Vote Leave and Mr Grimes. The individuals and the campaign groups investigated by us were all invited to be interviewed and to provide us with evidence. Vote Leave declined to be interviewed. Its lack of cooperation is reflected in the penalties," the Commission said on its web site.

It complainrd that the level of fines available to it are "inadequate".

Last month the Commission mades a series of recommendations to the UK government and social media platforms around foreign funding and the provenance of ads.

"Facebook, Google and Twitter have said that they will put in place new controls to check that people or organisations who want to pay to place political adverts about elections in the United States are actually based there. We would like to see similar controls introduced for elections and referendums in the UK," it said.