The Horsell's Mouth Politics, pedantry and personal interests

A shady political donor with a conviction in his absence for fraud who channelled money to a UK political party via his company and who is still on the run. A Tory donor or one of Labour’s stooges? No, this is Michael Brown, a top Liberal Democrat funder who dealt in bogus international bonds, stole £30million from his clients and channelled it to the Lib Dems through a company called 5th Avenue Partners.

It seems that the Lib Dems are so desperate to hold on to his £2.4million donation that they went to the Electoral Commission to keep the money and today, bizarrely, they were told that despite Brown being the sole director of 5th Avenue Partners there was “no reasonable basis” to conclude that he himself had made the donation personally - rather that it being a donation from the company – and as such it was permissable under electoral law.

You’ve got to be kidding me. Look, I know that other parties have had similarly embarrassing run-ins with donors and that the world of political donation is murkier than the Solent in a storm. But this is self-evidently a case of someone using a proxy for a donation, even if that proxy is a legitimate entity.

One also has to ask the question of why the Liberal Democrats – who make a particular virtue of their supposed elevation above the funding ambiguities of the two largest parties – want to accept money from a man with such a blatantly dubious background. I would certainly oppose the Conservatives receiving money from someone with unspent convictions for fraud on such a large scale.

I suppose Bernard Madoff will be receiving a personalised edition of In Focus next with a donation form at the bottom. To me it seems clear that the Lib Dems’ claim to be whiter than white is every bit as bogus as Mr Brown’s dodgy international bonds.