Vote Leave faces probe on spending

Brexit group accused of exceeding limit by nearly 500,000 pounds

Vote Leave, Britain's official Brexit campaign group for the 2016 referendum, has been referred to the police for breaking electoral law.

The Electoral Commission found that the campaign group exceeded its legal spending limit of 7 million pounds ($9.2 million) by almost 500,000 pounds.

Vote Leave worked alongside a youth-focused campaign group, BeLeave, that spent more than 675,000 pounds with Aggregate IQ, which used social media data to target voters. The commission said this should have been declared by Vote Leave.

Bob Posner, the Electoral Commission's director of political finance and regulation and legal counsel, said it had found "serious breaches" of the law.

"Vote Leave has resisted our investigation from the start, including contesting our right as the statutory regulator to open the investigation. It has refused to cooperate, refused our requests to put forward a representative for interview, and forced us to use our legal powers to compel it to provide evidence," he said.

"We found substantial evidence that the two groups worked to a common plan, did not declare their joint working and did not adhere to the legal spending limits.

"These are serious breaches of the laws put in place by Parliament to ensure fairness and transparency at elections and referendums."

The commission also found that Vote Leave filed an incomplete and inaccurate spending report, with almost 234,501 pounds reported incorrectly, and invoices missing for a total of 12,849 pounds of spending.

BeLeave founder Darren Grimes has been fined 20,000 pounds after being found to have committed two offences, while Vote Leave has been fined 61,000 pounds.

A statement said: "The commission has now referred both Mr David Halsall, the responsible person for Vote Leave, and Mr Grimes to the Metropolitan Police in relation to false declarations of campaign spending."

A spokesman for Vote Leave said the report contained a "number of false accusations and incorrect assertions that are wholly inaccurate and do not stand up to scrutiny".

The spokesman said: "It is astonishing that nobody from Vote Leave has been interviewed by the commission in the production of this report, nor indeed at any point in the past two years, despite Vote Leave repeatedly making it clear they are willing to do so.

"Yet the commission has interviewed the so-called 'whistleblowers' who have no knowledge of how Vote Leave operated and whose credibility has been seriously called into question."

He went on to claim that the allegations were motivated by a political agenda and accused the commission of being biased.

"The commission has failed to follow due process, and in doing so has based its conclusions on unfounded claims and conspiracy theories," he said.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Theresa May was bracing for another Commons battle over Brexit on Tuesday, after winning a series of votes in Parliament on Monday that just about kept her strategy to leave the EU on track.

Four amendments put forward by Brexit supporters passed on Monday, steering May's soft Brexit blueprint in a harder direction, but on Tuesday pro-EU Tory amendments sought revenge with votes on the Trade Bill that says the government must establish a frictionless free trade area for goods between the UK and EU.

May has vowed to stick to her plan to negotiate the closest possible trade ties with the EU, saying her strategy was the only one that could meet the government's aims for Brexit, the biggest shift in Britain's foreign and trade policy for decades. But the deep divisions within the Conservative Party have hampered progress in talks with the EU.