JUST days before voters in England and Wales decided that they wanted to take the UK out of the EU a little known organisation, headquartered in a modest semi-detached in East Renfrewshire, made electoral history, donating a whopping £435,000 to the DUP. Arlene Foster’s party then used the vast majority of that money on campaigning her voters would never see.
On June 21, two days before the vote, the party funded a four-page wraparound pro-Leave advert in The Metro.
In those pre-pandemic days, the freesheet, owned by the Daily Mail and General Trust, would have been seen by tens of thousands of commuters across Scotland, England and Wales. The paper, however, does not print in Northern Ireland.
Because of the Troubles, donors to political parties in Northern Ireland have until very recently been allowed to remain anonymous.
It was only after much pressure, and a lengthy investigation by Open Democracy, that the DUP revealed that the group behind the donation was the Constitutional Research Council.
READ MORE: Tory dark money donor Richard Cook linked to row involving fraudster
The organisation is headed up by Richard Cook, a former vice-chair of the Tories, and a former Westminster and Holyrood candidate.
As well as the DUP, the CRC have donated £6500 to Tory MP Steve Baker during his time as chair of the highly influential Brexiteer European Research Group.
Cook has also boasted of huge sums being available to make a “new and positive campaign for the Union” during any indyref2. He has so far resisted all attempts to say where the CRC gets its money from. It has no website, and publishes no accounts.
Cook’s previous business associates include Prince Nawwaf bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the former Saudi minister for finance, government spokesman, diplomat and head of intelligence, and the Danish arms dealer Peter Haestrup, who has been linked to a gun running case in West Bengal.
An investigation by BBC Northern Ireland’s Spotlight claimed Cook shipped illegal tyre waste to India in 2009, presented fake documents to the authorities and left a shipping company with a bill of more than £1 million.
Programme makers travelled to Ukraine where Cook’s company had apparently signed an $80m contract in 2013 for the purchase of used railway tracks. But it transpired the person behind the company in Ukraine was a convicted criminal from Germany who had been sentenced to eight years in jail for his role in a large-scale food fraud.
Cook has always denied the BBC’s allegations.
In an interview with the Sunday Herald in 2017, Cook said: “The CRC is regulated by the Electoral Commission. We operate solely in the UK. We accept donations only from eligible UK donors. We donate solely to permissible UK entities.”
However, he declined to offer any information on the identities of CRC donors and members: “I’m not going to get into the donors, like I am not going to get into the members.”
He has confirmed the CRC has an executive committee, but has declined to name its members, put a figure on how much it has raised, or talk about other specific causes that have been funded. Cook has made several attempts at getting elected for the Scottish Tories. In 2010, he tried to dislodge Labour’s Jim Murphy in East Renfrewshire, but lost by around 10,000 votes.
Last year during an interview with the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland, Scottish Tory leader Jackson Carlaw revealed that Cook was still a member of the party but said he had not spoken to him for several years.
Asked if he had contacted Cook to “try to clear up these matters” he replied; “No,” adding: “Mr Cook was not acting on behalf of the Conservative Party.”
Carlaw said he would like Cook to “say to us where the money came from that underwrote that donation to the Leave campaign, but those are questions for him and the DUP”.
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