Police are investigating after a Jewish candidate standing for the Brexit party at the European elections had a 10 metre (30ft) swastika painted on his company’s building in east London.

Lance Forman, a businessman who owns the H Forman & Son smoked salmon company, found his headquarters and restaurant near the Olympic Park had been daubed with an antisemitic mural.

Forman’s business is the UK’s oldest salmon curer, which was set up by his great-grandfather in 1905.

A Met police spokesman said officers were investigating a suspected incident of race-related criminal damage. It is thought to have occurred shortly before midnight on Tuesday.

Forman told the Jewish Chronicle: “My dad fled the Nazis in Poland and is a Holocaust survivor who spent the war years as a child in a Siberian prison camp.

“He has worked with HET (the Holocaust Educational Trust) to teach children about the horrors of antisemitism. So the fact that we have been targeted in this antisemitic way is quite horrific and sick.

“The police have images of the culprits on CCTV and I sincerely hope they are tracked down.”

The incident comes at a time of heightened tensions in political campaigning with some candidates subject to abuse.

Police are also investigating a rape threat against Jess Phillips, the Labour MP, by Carl Benjamin, a candidate for Ukip.

Security for politicians has been stepped up after the murder of the Labour backbencher Jo Cox in the run-up to the 2016 EU referendum.