Watchdog has ‘reasonable grounds to suspect offence was committed’ by Vote Leave and student campaigner who received £625,000 from group

Vote Leave is under investigation by the Electoral Commission over whether it breached the £7m EU referendum spending limit, with allegations being made that it channelled funds for a social Brexit media campaign via £625,000 in donations to a student.

The watchdog said that the new information meant it had “reasonable grounds to suspect an offence may have been committed” and said it would examine if the Boris Johnson and Michael Gove-fronted campaign had filed its returns correctly.

Its unexpected intervention came as the commission was facing a legal challenge from remain grassroots campaigners, unhappy that it had dropped a previous investigation into the spending of Vote Leave and satellite Brexit campaigns that are accused of not being properly independent of it.

Q&A Can the Electoral Commission inquiry undermine Brexit? Show Hide Campaigners on either side of the EU debate will have differing opinions on whether any adverse finding on spending calls the result of the referendum into question. However, Jo Maugham, the barrister behind the Good Law Project, said any illegal spending would undermine the result, adding to concerns about Russian meddling and Brexiters failing to deliver promises they made during the campaign. The commission can impose a fine of up to £20,000 for individual rule breaches. Any evidence of more serious offences uncovered in the course of the investigation can be referred to the police if warranted.

During the referendum campaign, fashion design student Darren Grimes, who was then 23 and ran a campaign called BeLeave, was given £625,000 by Vote Leave. The cash was paid directly to a data analytics firm specialising in social media called AggregateIQ that had also been heavily used by Vote Leave.



Electoral campaign records show Vote Leave spent around 40% of its entire £6.8m total spend on using the firm’s data analysis services. Vote Leave’s legal limit as the designated leave campaign was £7m.

As a registered independent leave campaigner, Grimes was permitted to spend up to £700,000 during the referendum campaign. It was also permissible for him to receive a donation from Vote Leave, as long as his BeLeave campaign was run entirely independently.

However, the Electoral Commission is investigating whether the two organisations were completely separate, with individual strategies and organisation. Grimes and Vote Leave deny there was any formal coordination on their campaigns.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Darren Grimes set up BeLeave, a group representing young people in the campaign for a leave vote.

Campaigners coordinated by barrister Jolyon Maugham QC, director of the Good Law Project, were due to submit pleadings in an attempt to win a judicial review of the commission’s decision to drop its first investigation into Vote Leave on Tuesday.

In documents submitted to the high court, seen by the Guardian, it is argued that BeLeave was not a separate organisation to Vote Leave, but in effect acted as the campaign’s youth wing.



The BeLeave logo can be seen on Vote Leave’s own website, where BeLeave is listed as an “outreach group”. The logos are remarkably similar, using similar font and the ballot box symbol, but blue rather than Vote Leave’s red.

Maugham said: “We are 18 months after the referendum vote. It is extraordinary that only now is the Electoral commission taking a serious look at whether the rules were complied with. And only in response to legal action.”

If the watchdog finds that the breaches have been committed, it may impose a fine of up to £20,000 for each individual offence. Vote Leave was run day-to-day by political strategist Matthew Elliott and Dominic Cummings, a former special adviser to Michael Gove. Grimes is now the deputy editor of the Brexit Central website, where Elliott is now editor-at-large.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Matthew Elliott and Dominic Cummings, who ran Vote Leave. Composite: Peter Nicholls/Reuters/David Levenson/Getty Images

AggregateIQ, a small Canadian firm, has been highly credited for its work in the campaign by senior members of Vote Leave. Communications director Paul Stephenson called it “instrumental in helping the Leave campaign win... they transformed Vote Leave’s digital offering and helped us to contact voters over one billion times online”.

A second group, called Veterans for Britain, is also under investigation by the commission. It received a donation worth £100,000 from Vote Leave in the run-up to the 2016 vote, which was also paid directly to AggregateIQ. The campaign group assembled to put forward defence and security arguments in support of Britain leaving the EU.

Among its advisory board were high-profile defence and security figures including Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan.

Bob Posner, the electoral commission’s director of political finance and regulation, said there were legitimate questions over the funding of campaigners which “risks causing harm to voters’ confidence in the referendum”.



“There is significant public interest in being satisfied that the facts are known about Vote Leave’s spending on the campaign, particularly as it was a lead campaigner with a greater spending limit than any other campaigners on the leave side.”

The commission told the Good Law Project that its fresh investigation was “commenced after internal consideration of the papers while responding to a judicial review initiated by the Good Law Project of the decision not to investigate following the original assessments”.

Evidence submitted by campaigners highlights the fact that all three groups – Vote Leave, Veterans for Britain and BeLeave – chose to spend their money with the same small data analytics firm, which has a minimal online presence.

A spokesman for Veterans for Britain previously told the Observer they had been contacted by AggregateIQ directly. “I didn’t find AggregateIQ. They found us. They rang us up and pitched us,” a spokesman said.

In emails released after a freedom of information request, Grimes told the commission that his spending “was done in isolation of Vote Leave Ltd … we didn’t discuss with Vote Leave how we would spend the money apart from telling them that it was for our digital campaign and that is why we asked for the money to be paid directly to the company were working with AggregateIQ”.

The evidence also cites a leaked letter from Conservative MP Steve Baker, who is now a DExEU minister. Before the referendum, he wrote: “It is open to the Vote Leave family to create separate legal entities, each of which could spend £700,000: Vote Leave will be able to spend as much money as is necessary to win the referendum.” The letter was leaked to the Times in February 2016.

In a blog after the campaign, Cummings wrote that Vote Leave had begun to raise far more money than it could legally spend in the last few weeks of the campaign. Cummings said Vote Leave had donated 5% of its fundraising to other campaigns, writing that this was “suddenly allowed in the last few weeks of the campaign by the Electoral Commission”.

Vote Leave inquiry: what is Electoral Commission investigating? Read more

In an endorsement on the firm’s website, Cummings said Vote Leave “owes a great deal of its success to the work of AggregateIQ... We couldn’t have done it without them”.



Electoral Commission guidance requires campaigners to declare if they are working together, to avoid registered campaigns circumventing the spending limits by setting up multiple other campaigns. The guidance states: “Working together means spending money as a result of a coordinated plan or arrangement between two or more campaigners.”

A spokesman for the Electoral Commission said: “The decision to open an investigation is not based on the legal argument presented by the Good Law Project, which we continue to contest. The review which has led to this investigation being opened was consequent to the commission reviewing its previous assessment under its own normal procedures.”

Vote Leave, Darren Grimes and Veterans for Britain did not respond to requests for comment.