16 May 2017
Fintan O’Toole
”To recap briefly: two days before the Brexit referendum last June, the Metro freesheet in London and other British cities came wrapped in a four-page glossy propaganda supplement urging readers to vote Leave. Bizarrely, it was paid for by the DUP, even though Metro does not circulate in Northern Ireland. At the time, the DUP refused to say what the ads cost or where the money came from.
We’ve since learned that the Metro wraparound cost a staggering £282,000 (€330,000) – surely the biggest single campaign expense in the history of Irish politics. For context, the DUP had spent about £90,000 (€106,000) on its entire campaign for the previous month’s assembly elections. But this was not all: the DUP eventually admitted that this spending came from a much larger donation of £425,622 (€530,000) from a mysterious organisation, the Constitutional Research Council.
Mystery
The mystery is not why someone seeking to influence the Brexit vote would want to do so through the DUP. Disgracefully, Northern Ireland is exempt from the UK’s requirements for the sources of large donations to be declared. The mystery, rather, is who were the ultimate sources of this money and why was it so important to keep their identities secret.”
DUP Leader at Downing Street
9 June 2017
The strange tale of the DUP, Brexit, a mysterious £425,000 donation and a Saudi prince
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/election-dup-brexit-donations-saudi-arabia-tale-tories-theresa-may-a7782681.html
Altergoman
June 15, 2017
OTT surprised that the Irish Times article as to why the DUP spent nearly £300K on ads for Brexit in the London and now SE free paper The Metro and only c£90K in NI their relevant area!
- It floats the suggestion that it was via a Saudi backed Irish co.
- DUP receiving funds for acting as the fall guys.
- Foreign money is banned in UK as donations to political parties.
- My old geezer logic says this is a scandal waiting to happen.
- The author was a Fintan O’Toole around 10th June
ukgovernmentwatch 