Tag: Cleo Watson

Members of the official Brexit campaign during the EU referendum may have committed criminal offences relating to overspending and collusion, according to lawyers advising whistleblowers who worked inside the organisation. They were reviewing a dossier of evidence supplied by solicitors Bindmans, which contained examples of alleged collusion showing that Vote Leave and BeLeave were not separate and therefore that the leave campaign spent over the £7m legal limit set by the Electoral Commission. The dossier has also been passed to the Electoral Commission, which is responsible for election law. Tamsin Allen, from Bindmans, told a press conference “that there is a strong suspicion that the campaigns were very closely linked and co-ordinated, in which case it may be that Vote Leave spent huge sums unlawfully and its declaration of expenses is incorrect”. Vote Leave formally declared it had spent £6.77m during the campaign in the summer of 2016, well below the £7m limit. Bindmans’ dossier was largely based on evidence supplied by Shahmir Sanni, a volunteer who worked at both Vote Leave and BeLeave, with supporting evidence from Christopher Wylie, a former employee of the political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica who worked on the Trump election campaign and who had worked for AggregateIQ. Wylie said that an employee of AggregateIQ had told him the relationship between Vote Leave and BeLeave was “totally illegal” because “you are not allowed to coordinate between different campaigns and not declare it”. The lawyers said there were also “grounds to investigate” Stephen Parkinson, Vote Leave’s national organiser, who now works as Theresa May’s special adviser and Cleo Watson, who was Vote Leave’s head of outreach and also now works at No 10. Montgomery and Mountfield said in their opinion that there were “significant questions” about the role of a senior Vote Leave official who appeared to have removed references to themself and others in discussions with BeLeave after the referendum by appearing “to change permissions on a BeLeave shared drive in March 2017 while an EC [Electoral Commission] investigation into Vote Leave was under way”. Vote Leave has repeatedly denied it coordinated its activities with BeLeave.