[The images above are of the BeLeave and apparently unrelated VoteLeave logos. Fair use exception applies].

Should you have endless money to spend you can capture our democracy. To protect it from capture we have legal spending limits. Those spending limits apply to your spending in general elections and they apply to your spending in referendums. And to ensure those spending limits are effective the law stops you channeling excess spending through puppet entities.

Does the organisation share a "plan or other arrangement" with another entity to obtain a particular outcome? That is the question the law asks to determine whether an entity is a puppet entity - and it is a broad test.

If you have a puppet entity, its spending counts as yours. And if you don't report it as yours you commit a criminal offence.

The law also establishes a body - the Electoral Commission - to police those legal spending limits and to protect our democracy. When it doesn't do its job our democracy can't function: those who seek to abide by the law will inevitably be outspent by those who are indifferent to whether they comply with the law.

Did the Electoral Commission do its job during the referendum?

Was the Electoral Commission watchdog or asleep on the job?

Here are some facts - and they are not in dispute.

(1) In February 2016, Steve Baker MP, lobbying for Vote Leave to be designated as the official leave campaign, sent a round robin email asking recipients to support Vote Leave because it claimed to have found a loophole in the spending rules. Here is what he said:

"It is open to the Vote Leave family to create separate legal entities each of which could spend £700k: Vote Leave will be able to spend as much money as is necessary to win the referendum ";

(2) despite this stated plan to break the law, the Electoral Commission designated Vote Leave as the official 'Leave' campaign;

(3) with less than a month to go in the referendum campaign, Vote Leave was bumping up against its spending limits;

(4) at that time Mr Grimes was a fashion design student who had a small social media presence: around 6,000 Facebook fans and 4,000 Twitter followers. You can see a photo of him in a Vote Leave t-shirt alongside Co-Convenor of Vote Leave Michael Gove and in front of a Vote Leave sign here;

(5) Vote Leave was unable to spend more itself but it gave Mr Grimes £625,000;

(6) in the middle of Canada, in a City you've never heard of, above an opticians you've never heard of, was a then obscure company called "Aggregate IQ";

(7) Vote Leave spent 40 per cent of Vote Leave’s £6.8 million budget with Aggregate IQ.

(8) Darren Grimes - in Brighton - also spent the £625,000 donated by Vote Leave with the Canadian company Aggregate IQ;

(9) the money never passed through Darren Grimes' hands. He never had control of the cash. Instead Vote Leave paid Mr Grimes' bill with Aggregate IQ;

(10) in the run up to the Referendum vote, at the same time as Darren Grimes - targeting younger voters - was working with Aggregate IQ using Vote Leave money, Veterans for Britain - targeting older voters - was... working with Aggregate IQ using Vote Leave money;

(11) as you can see from the image Vote Leave and Darren Grimes also used the same logo.

Nevertheless, the Electoral Commission decided that there were not even reasonable grounds to suspect that Vote Leave and Darren Grimes were working together.

We think this is bananas; we think it's laughable; we think it brings the Electoral Commission into disrepute; and we think it undermines our democracy.

We want to force the Electoral Commission to do what it's there for and what it promised to do before the referendum to ensure "integrity... of... campaign... spending." We want to force it to reopen its investigation. We think if it does it can only properly conclude that Vote Leave has committed a criminal offence.

We have assembled a high class team. It will be led by Jessica Simor QC of Matrix Chambers; she will be supported by Tom Cleaver of Blackstone Chambers. They will be instructed by Polly Glynn of Deighton Pierce Glynn. We believe our prospects of succeeding in the judicial review are very good.

If you care about our democracy, we invite you to participate in funding what we hope will be a landmark case to protect it.

The Mechanics

We invite you to read our letter to the Electoral Commission here. That letter is the first formal step in the legal process and, if we raise the money, we should be in a position to issue proceedings in the High Court against the Electoral Commission in around a fortnight.

I understand our prospects of succeeding to be very good. However, of course, there can be no certainty about the outcome.

A judicial review action takes place in two stages. First, you need permission from the Court. We are seeking to raise £35,000 to take the case to the permission stage. If we get permission we will then need to prepare for the full hearing. If we hit the first £40,000 target we will seek to raise £40,000 for the next stage - the so-called 'stretch target'. We are seeking to raise 106% of this sum to cover our direct costs to CrowdJustice for this fundraising.

We anticipate that these sums will be sufficient to take the case to a conclusion in the High Court. There are, however, circumstances in which we may need to ask for more: in particular if the case changes in nature into a much more fact heavy case than we presently anticipate or if we are unable to secure the protection that we presently anticipate against adverse costs.

The legal team are working at very heavily discounted rates - and we anticipate that an element of their work will be entirely free.

We anticipate that we will obtain permission. However, if we are wrong, any surplus money raised will be held for other litigation with similar ends: it will not go into the general funds of the Good Law Project. There are no circumstances in which any monies raised will go to Jo Maugham QC personally and neither he nor Good Law Project will make any charge against these monies in connection with this litigation - not even for direct expenses.