On June 21st, two days before the Brexit referendum, I picked up a copy of the Metro newspaper at a train station on the outskirts of Sunderland.
“Take back control” urged a bold, four-page wraparound on the front of the freesheet. The advert’s reverse bore a surprising indication of its provenance – the Democratic Unionist Party’s lion-headed logo.
The DUP's Brexit campaign spending received little attention at the time. When asked about the Metro advert – which cost an estimated £282,000 (€330,000) and circulated across Britain but not Northern Ireland – DUP MLA Mervyn Storey said it was "a price worth paying" for leaving the EU.
More recently, questions have been asked about the DUP’s unusually large Brexit campaign spend. By way of comparison, the party spent less than £90,000 in last May’sStormont election campaign.
During a leader’s debate ahead of Thursday’s Assembly election, Arlene Foster demurred when asked about her party’s Brexit funders. She did not have to reveal her donors, Foster said. The DUP leader was right. Under Northern Irish electoral law political donations are still secret.
Now, however, we do know – a little – more about the DUP’s deep-pocketed donors.
The DUP spent over £425,000 during the European Union referendum, according to the UK Electoral Commission. This included £99,600 on Leave stickers, badges, advertising boards and T-shirts from a Cambridgeshire company, and £32,7850 on an online advertising business called AggregateIQ which was thought to be focused on Facebook adverts.
Barely £10,000 of the total was spent on campaigning in Northern Ireland.
Under media pressure, DUP MP Sir Jeffrey Donaldson revealed that the £425,000 came from something called the Constitutional Research Council, an organisation with no constitution, legal status or named members which claims to be pro-union.
So why did the organisation give this kind of money to the DUP?
Opposed to break-up
We don't know. The organisation has refused to give public interviews – beyond a few quotes to the Herald in Glasgow – but its chairman, Richard Cook, has said the group was opposed to the break-up of the United Kingdom.
Cook, so far, is the only name connected with the DUP’s donations. He has an active political past. In 2010, Cook stood as the Scottish Conservative candidate in Eastwood, outside Glasgow. He lost to former Labour minister Jim Murphy.
Cook has also been busy in business, and in 2013 he set up a management company focused on the Middle East.
The co-director of the company was a Danish man named Peter Haestrup who was investigated by the Indian Central Bureau of Investigation as a possible intermediary in the controversial Purulia arms drop. In 1995, over a tonne of weapons, intended for a violent Hindu cult opposed to West Bengal’s provincial communist government, was dropped from a transport plane in what Indian authorities called “the biggest crime in the country’s history”.
Haestrup was never charged with any wrongdoing.
Also among Cook’s former business associates was the ertwhile head of the Saudi Arabian intelligence service.
There is no suggestion that Cook – who lives in a two-storey house in a Glasgow suburb – personally donated £425,000 to the DUP. So who did?
In the rest of the UK, all the Constitutional Research Council’s donors would have been made public. But political funding in Northern Ireland is uniquely secretive.
The UK Electoral Commission makes a record of donations to Northern Irish parties but these are not made public due to “special circumstances” – the security concerns linked to the Troubles. This ban, known as the prescribed period, was only due to last until October 2010 but its end date has been repeatedly extended.
Security situation
On paper, all Northern Irish parties agree that the security situation is no longer a barrier to publishing details of donations. Ahead of the May 2016 devolved elections the DUP manifesto included a commitment to “open, transparent and fair” donations. But, of the major parties, only Alliance and the Greens actually publish details of their donations.
Northern Ireland Secretary of State James Brokenshire has the power to release the names of political donors but so far has chosen not to.
Political donations have long been a hot potato in Northern Ireland. Sinn Féin, in particular, raises significant funds from the United States. But the Brexit referendum – in which the UK as a whole was treated as a single constituency – was probably the first time cash funnelled through a Northern Irish party had a significant bearing on a British electoral contest.
The DUP only registered as a participant in the Brexit campaign in May 2016, barely four weeks before the vote. Most of the DUP’s funds were spent in the final, crucial, hours leading up to a very close 52 per cent to 48 per cent result.
When pressed on whether he knew who the individuals behind the Constitutional Research Council were, Sir Jeffrey said: “We don’t need to know who made the donations”.
“We have fulfilled all the requirements under electoral law. There is no further investigation underway into the DUP,” he added.
The DUP may not have broken any laws, but many in Northern Ireland – and across the UK – are starting to ask just who was the source of the party’s untypically lavish Brexit campaign spending.
