The United Kingdom's official campaign against Brexit is punished by a fine

LONDON: The British campaign for the Brexit, Vote Leave, was fined for violating the spending rules in the EU membership referendum in 2016, announced Tuesday. Electoral Commission.

The Electoral Commission said that the winning party in the referendum had worked with a small pro-Brexit group called BeLeave to circumvent the campaign's funding rules.

"We found substantial evidence that the two groups worked on a common plan, did not declare their work together, and did not meet the legal spending limits," said Bob Posner, Director of Political Financing and Regulation. .

"These are serious violations of the laws put in place by parliament to ensure fairness and transparency in elections and referendums," Posner said.

A Vote Leave spokesperson accused the Electoral Commission of being "motivated by a political agenda rather than discovering the facts."

The spokesman said that there were "a number of false accusations and incorrect statements that are totally inaccurate and do not stand up to scrutiny".

According to the report, the Vote Leave campaign has surpbaded by nearly £ 500,000 its statutory spending limit of £ 7.0 million ($ 7.9 million, $ 9.3 million ).

Vote Leave, who had the support of the Eurosceptic Boris Johnson, also returned an incomplete and inaccurate expense report and failed to submit invoices for his expenses.

According to the report, the BeLeave group, founded by fashion student Darren Grimes, spent more than £ 675,000 with Aggregate IQ, a Canadian digital political advertising company, as part of a "Common plan" with voting leave.

The company was mentioned in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a now-defunct British company accused of abusing data obtained from Facebook to target political ads.

Christopher Wylie, a whistleblower for Cambridge Analytica, claimed that pro-Brexit groups were working together to circumvent campaign finance rules using Aggregate IQ services.

Wylie stated that Aggregate IQ was linked to Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), the parent company of Cambridge Analytica.