LONDON 4 Jul (ANA) - The official Brexit campaign is expected to be found guilty of four charges of breaking electoral law, the BBC has been told.

 

The draft of an investigation into Vote Leave concludes it broke spending limits and failed to comply with some of the rules.

 

It also imposes fines as a result of its findings.

 

But the group's former chief executive claimed the Electoral Commission had not followed due process.

 

Matthew Elliott has submitted a 500-page dossier to the Electoral Commission rebutting the claims.

 

The commission said Vote Leave had taken the "unusual step" of going public having seen the draft report.

 

According to Vote Leave's dossier, the commission finds the campaign group:

 

made an inaccurate return of campaign expenditure

is missing invoices and receipts

failed to comply with a statutory notice

exceeded its spending limit

 

Crucially, the draft report is said to claim there was coordination between Vote Leave and a smaller campaign, BeLeave, which received a donation of more than £600,000 in the closing weeks of the referendum, after advice from the Vote Leave director Dominic Cummings.

 

For months there have been allegations that the two campaigns broke the rules by working together too closely. The electoral rules stipulate that different campaign groups can work loosely together but they must not have a "common plan".

 

This has always been denied by the two groups and has been investigated twice already by the Electoral Commission.

 

Vote Leave now admits there was email correspondence between the donor in question, Anthony Clake, and Mr Cummings about passing the donation onto BeLeave.

 

It is understood that this third investigation concludes that there was a "common plan", and therefore the law was broken.(ANA)

FA/ANA/4 July 2018------