The Electoral Commission announcement today that it is investigating Arron Banks, the top Brexit campaign funder, has caused a bit of a splash. But what are they investigating him for?
As I was going through Alastair Sloan and Iain Campbell's research for their piece on Arron Banks for openDemocracy, the thing which always struck me as odd about Arron Banks’ donations to Brexit was not the scale of them. It wasn’t even that he may have given a bigger portion of his wealth than he let on. After all, rich people sometimes care about things. Sometimes they care a lot. What struck me as odd is, as I asked his sidekick Andy Wigmore on Twitter the other day, why use a front company? Why give the money, via that company, in the form of materials rather than cash? If the money did really all come from Banks, why did he channel it through a company called “Better for the Country Limited”, and, mostly, through non-cash donations? Why not just write a cheque?
