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<\/p>\nSearchlight has analysed the spreadsheet, which was posted on the internet anonymously last month, and considers it almost certainly genuine. It covers a period from April 2007 to 26 November 2009 and shows payments to a large number of BNP officers, employees and suppliers. The first year\u2019s transactions match those on an earlier leaked document.<\/p>\n
The BNP\u2019s total income in 2008, the latest year for which accounts are available, was just under \u00a31 million, so even allowing for some increase during a European election campaign year, the sums going to Adlorries.com still represent a sizable proportion of the party\u2019s budget.<\/p>\n
The BNP also paid \u00a32,000 to Albion Logistical Solutions Ltd, \u00a319,199 to UKPT Trust and \u00a37,439 to the Pro Life Society. That adds up to \u00a3362,900 paid to Dowson\u2019s companies in the first 11 months of 2009.<\/p>\n
Dowson, who has several convictions and links to the loyalist murderer Michael Stone, first got involved with the BNP at the end of 2007 and transformed its fundraising capability. He also provided management training courses for BNP officers in spring 2008 at a villa he owns near Valencia in Spain. During 2008 his Midas Consultancy business received \u00a315,712 from the party and \u00a340,365 was paid to UKPT Trust for his fundraising services.<\/p>\n
Adlorries.com hires the staff for the BNP\u2019s Belfast bunker through employment agencies. After the leak of the BNP\u2019s membership list last year, it emerged that no security measures were in place, despite the party\u2019s promises after an earlier membership list leak in 2008, that all personal data would be held safely.<\/p>\n
The company also owns the advertising lorry that the BNP calls its \u201ctruth truck\u201d, contrary to statements in several fundraising appeals that the lorry was \u201cbought and paid for\u201d. Further evidence of this emerged from the BNP\u2019s return of expenditure on its European election campaign, lodged at the Electoral Commission last month, which shows \u00a315,000 paid to Adlorries.com for \u201cadvertising and publicity material\u201d, presumably hire of what anti-fascists call the lie lorry.<\/p>\n
Strangely, that \u00a315,000, which the return says was paid on 30 April 2009, does not appear on the spreadsheet. Nor does the \u00a3148,500 supposedly paid to Albion Logistical Solutions Ltd on 23 April for arranging the printing of the BNP\u2019s main European election leaflets.<\/p>\n
It may be that these payments came out of a different BNP bank account. The party runs several accounts for specific purposes, such as for the fundraising Trafalgar Club, its Excalibur merchandising operation and \u201cFreedom Promotions\u201d. The party also holds one or more accounts in the name of British Heritage, into which many donations are paid, in particular those from supporters whom the party has persuaded to make regular donations by standing order, and donations made by credit or debit card.<\/p>\n
Although the spreadsheet shows many transfers into the Bank of Scotland account from British Heritage and Freedom Promotions, it is possible that some payments to suppliers were made directly from those accounts.<\/p>\n
Another possibility is that Adlorries.com paid for much of the BNP\u2019s election literature and other costs, and the large sums paid to Dowson\u2019s company include repayments of that \u201cloan\u201d. All bills during an election campaign have to be paid within 42 days of polling day, and in any case the commercial printers would undoubtedly have wanted payment before delivering the leaflets. If the BNP, which appears to have no overdraft facility or commercial loans, had not raised enough money to pay its bills, perhaps Dowson\u2019s company helped out. Certainly \u00a3334,262, all paid between mid April and mid September 2009, would be a lot for running a call centre and the occasional hire of an A-frame lorry.<\/p>\n
Many BNP members, including some on the party\u2019s national advisory council, are unhappy at the extent of Dowson\u2019s hold over the party. Perhaps to allay their concerns, or even some of his own, Nick Griffin, the party leader, sent his daughter Jennifer Matthys to Belfast to help run operations there.<\/p>\n
Matthys, 23, joined Dowson as a director of Adlorries.com on 17 July 2009, although Dowson retains ownership of the company. On appointment Matthys stated her occupation to be \u201cdata processor\u201d. Dowson\u2019s sister-in-law Marion Thomas, wife of Dowson\u2019s business partner Alex Thomas, became a director on the same day but left the company on 16 September. She is described as a \u201cbookeeper\u201d [sic].<\/p>\n
Another way in which Dowson was able to strengthen his influence on the BNP was through the appointment of John Thompson to run the party\u2019s \u201ctreasury department\u201d. Thompson, described as a \u201cprofessional chartered accountant\u201d has long looked after the finances for Dowson\u2019s various business and campaigning interests.<\/p>\n
The leak of the spreadsheet may have cast suspicion on Thompson. Only a handful of trusted people apart from Thompson and any staff he employs could have had access to the document, probably Griffin himself, the party\u2019s deputy leader Simon Darby and Philip Reddall, its treasurer.<\/p>\n
The Excel spreadsheet appears originally to have been created by Kenny Smith, a former BNP administration officer who was one of the leaders of the rebellion in the winter of 2007\/08. He was expelled from the party in December 2007 but his spreadsheet must have remained in use by other officers.<\/p>\n
If the leak came out of Thompson\u2019s office, that might explain why Darby is once again involved in running the party\u2019s finances. Darby took over from Jenny Noble as BNP\u2019s treasurer in spring 2009 but stepped down in October in favour of Reddall. Yet on 13 January 2010 he wrote, decrying the loss of communications at his home near Welshpool, \u201cSo here I find myself trying to run an election campaign, help manage the finances and be the press officer of a major political party without either a telephone line, broadband or even a dial-up connection\u201d.<\/p>\n
Why would Darby, who has no accounting qualification, be helping to manage the finances when the party has a \u201cprofessional chartered accountant\u201d to do the job?<\/p>\n
The embarrassment over the leaked list comes at a time when the BNP is still under the spotlight of the Electoral Commission after it submitted accounts for 2008 which Griffin admitted were \u201cinadequate\u201d. The party\u2019s inability to supply adequate records to its auditors meant that the accounts did not comply with the requirements of the Political Parties Elections and Referendums Act 2000 (PPERA).<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for the Electoral Commission told Searchlight that the BNP\u2019s auditors had provided the further information that the Commission had requested and the initial assessment is that there are \u201creasonable grounds to believe a breach of the PPERA may have occurred\u201d. The Commission is now reviewing the information and this may lead to an \u201cofficial investigation\u201d.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile Griffin continues frantically to try to persuade his members to upgrade to gold or life membership of the party. In his latest electronic newsletter, Griffin claims that the legal process undertaken by the Equality and Human Rights Commission to ensure the BNP complies with anti-discrimination legislation is in fact \u201ccriminal actions \u2026 designed to scupper our General Election plan\u201d by starving the party of membership fees. The party agreed in court to put recruitment on hold pending adoption of a new constitution, which Griffin appears confident his members will agree at an Extraordinary General Meeting on 14 February.<\/p>\n
However Griffin has now decided there is more to the supposed conspiracy against the BNP. \u201cRecent developments have revealed a far more sinister long-term plan\u201d, he writes. According to Griffin, the \u201cold-gang Lib-Lab-Con\u201d parties want to introduce proportional representation and state funding of political parties but to exclude the BNP. The recruitment freeze is designed to damage the BNP\u2019s general election effort, limit the number of constitu-encies the party can contest and thereby ensure it receives a low percentage of the national vote. Then PR and state funding of parties would be introduced, but the BNP would receive nothing because of its low vote.<\/p>\n
Seriously, that is the imaginative scenario Griffin describes, before referring to \u201clow-life vermin [one of Griffin\u2019s favourite words] that are trying to sabotage our party\u201d, invoking \u201cthe heroes of the Somme, D-Day and the Falklands\u201d and urging: \u201cIf we cannot welcome new members, then existing members MUST upgrade to fill the gap, otherwise their evil plan might succeed!\u201d<\/p>\n
The fact is that the membership freeze cannot have much effect on the BNP\u2019s income. In 2008 the party took in membership fees amounting to \u00a3166,006. Much of this would be renewals, which are still allowed. New membership fees during the three to four month membership freeze would hardly top \u00a330,000 and may be much less. The party could easily save that sum by shedding one or two of its large number of staff.<\/p>\n
But when has the BNP ever allowed the truth to get in the way of a good fundraising pitch?. As Darby said when confronted with the evidence that the party had only spent \u00a3282,843 on its European election campaign rather than the over \u00a3500,000 it had claimed, the party needs to exaggerate \u201cthere\u2019s a bit of hyperbole with politics\u201d.<\/p>\n
The Searchlight<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Searchlight has analysed the spreadsheet, which was posted on the internet anonymously last month, and considers it almost certainly genuine. It covers a period from April 2007 to 26 November 2009 and shows payments to a large number of BNP officers, employees and suppliers. The first year\u2019s transactions match those on an earlier leaked document. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":17609,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[94,922],"tags":[2716,1467,2717],"class_list":["post-17606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uk","category-world","tag-bank-of-scotland-account","tag-bnp","tag-bnps-bank-of-scotland-account"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17606"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17606\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}