ARTIST Gerard Burns donated artwork worth £23,000 to five SNP candidates to help them raise funds for their General Election campaign.
The celebrated painter gave the piece to Hannah Bardell and Joanna Cherry and three others, with each of the candidates taking 20 per cent of the auction price.
Burns’s donation was revealed in the latest update to the House of Commons register of interests, the first since last month’s election.
Other notable donations recorded include LibDem MP Christine Jardine’s £5,000 from the More United fund set up in memory of murdered MP Jo Cox.
The fund, which raised £370,000 through a crowdfunder, donated to more than a dozen candidates.
It’s not clear if Jardine was the only Scottish candidate to receive a donation from the fund as election expenses have not yet been published by the Electoral Commission. She was the only Scottish MP to record the donation on her register of interests.
Douglas Ross, who took the Moray constituency from SNP deputy leader Angus Robertson for the Tories, registered donations of around £27,500 from four different sources.
He was the only MP to have registered a donation from the Scottish Unionist Association Trust, which punted £7,500 towards his election bid.
Little is known about the trust, but in the months leading up to this year’s Scottish Parliament election, Tory branches across Scotland received eight separate donations worth a total of £28,083.49.
It’s registered at the same Glasgow address as the old office of former Tory MSP Bill Aitken, the Glasgow Unionist Association Trust, and the South Lanarkshire Conservatives.
The register for SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford records what appears to be a new a donation of £3,000 from hedge fund magnate David Craigen, who previously contributed to the Tory party’s coffers.
Blackford was accused of hypocrisy when he took a donation from the banker in 2015. At the time the MP said Craigen was a friend and he had “no knowledge of him being a Tory”.
Scottish Labour recently called on Blackford to give up his other jobs, which, according to the register, earn him almost £50,000 a year on top of his £75,000 MP’s salary.
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