The strange link between the DUP Brexit donation and a notorious Indian gun running trial
We
still don’t know how key Leave campaign adverts were funded, but the
one man who has been named has some surprising relationships...
28 February 2017
Peter Haestrup, who founded Five Star Investment Management Ltd with Richard Cook and Prince Nawwaf bin Abdulaziz al SaudThe shadowy donor group that gave Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) £425,000 for lavish pro-Brexit advertising during the referendum campaign has links with a Danish national who has told openDemocracy that he was involved in a notorious 1990s gun-running case in India.
On 15 February, openDemocracy revealed that the DUP had spent over a quarter of a million on Leave campaign advertisements across the UK, but that the source of this funding was secret due to the lack of donor transparency in Northern Ireland. Under pressure following our exposure of this extraordinary spend on the campaign, the DUP finally confessed that a donation of £425,000 was given to the party by a mysterious organisation calling itself ‘the Constitutional Research Council’.
Despite claims by the DUP that it has now named its donors, almost nothing is known about the Constitutional Research Council. This shadowy group has no formal or legal status and refuses to name its members, if it has any. There is no evidence that it has any way of generating income, giving it the appearance of a front organisation, set up to funnel money from secretive sources into political campaigns.
The DUP has told openDemocracy that they “don’t need to know” who the individuals behind the CRC donations are. This admission raises questions about how much the DUP checked about where the £425,000 donation was coming from, which Electoral Commission guidelines indicate they should. However, the DUP did name the CRC’s chair: former Scottish Conservative parliamentary candidate, Richard Cook.
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