£50,000 repaid to charity after claims it was misused for anti-EU campaigning

The leader of the Vote Leave campaign has repaid a £50,000 charitable grant after he was found to have used the money to produce a highly political 1,000-page anti-EU dossier.

Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the official pro-Brexit campaign in last June’s referendum, used a grant from a charity he had set up to fund a high-profile campaign report called Change or Go – How Britain Would Gain Influence and Prosper Outside an Unreformed EU.

The repayment follows concerns raised with the Charity Commission that the Politics and Economics Research Trust (PERT), set up by Elliott in 2006, should not be supporting groups to undertake research that takes a political position on a contested topic like EU membership.

PERT is constituted as an educational charity and it benefits from tax relief on donations. Over the past five years it has given most of its grants – more than £2m – to anti-EU campaign groups run by Elliott. [The Guardian]

The Charity Commission’s investigation found that:

The charity did not have formal grant agreements in place, and did not have processes to monitor research projects the charity had funded … This lack of formal process and oversight was a regulatory concern, as the trustees could not be certain that its funding was being used solely to further its objects.

Previously two Brexit campaigners were fined for breaking law during European referendum.