Via Guido Fawkes comes a report in the Evening Standard that arrests are about to be made in the New Labour election funding scandal. Oooh! At last they get their comeuppance. Who could it be? David “Friend of New Labour But Not Of Gordon Brown” Abrahams’ ? A cabinet member? Gordon Brown himself? Who?
Mr Abrahams made the payments through his builder, his secretary, a solicitor and a lollipop lady to avoid being identified officially as a donor.
Now, six weeks after Scotland Yard began investigating, detectives are preparing to make their first arrests.
It is believed two of the proxy donors could be among the first to be detained.
Peter Watt, who resigned as Labour’s general secretary, is likely to face criminal charges over his role in the affair.
He signed off the forms sent to the Electoral Commission naming secretary Janet Kidd and builder Ray Ruddick as the donors to the party.
However, the money was actually from Mr Abrahams.
If this report is true, it’s the least important (albeit pivotal) people in the case: the people Abrahams put up as proxies to give money secretly to Gordon Brown and New Labour. Why only them? Why only the proxies and not the principall, Abrahams, or the Labour figures associated with him like Mendelsohn? Gordon Brown’s already publicly admitted that illegalities have taken place.
The CPS’ or the police’s blatant leaking (allowing suspects to know that they’re about to get nicked before it happens, which has got to be a criminal, not to mention a disciplinary, offence) is pretty shocking too, though depressingly usual
What I don’t understand is the cackhanded timing of the leak: it’s not good for the investigation or the government on the face of it.
Its bound to draw further unwanted attention to Brown crony Peter “I was in the ANC once you know” Hain, the Minister for Work and Pensions who’s hot, hot hot on cheats who evade the law (and who’s just announced plans to make disabled people effectively work for the state for free, whether they’re able to or not. Perhaps they could be proxies for private equity barons, yes, that might work….).
Hain the Vain’s neck deep, right up to his permatan in fact, in the proverbial right now for having accepted and not declared a hundred grand in donations to his ldeputy leadership campaign. To put the cherry on top, he’s also allegedl to have taken some of that undeclared money in return for publicly endorsing one of those donor’s dodgy financial product in ads.
Corruption and financial impropriety aren’t something the Son of The Manse would like attention drawn to just now, not in these fragile economic times,
Thiese arrests story couldn’t be worse for the government or the police in PR terms – the public’s immediate reaction to this story, if true, is quite likely to be as mine was, “Bloody typical, Labour gets away with it again.”
