Political

£120,000 fine for Leave.EU and Arron Banks’s insurance firm

Another one to add to the long, long list of Leave campaigners breaking the law:

The information commissioner has launched an audit into Leave.EU and the insurance company owned by the campaign’s key financial backer, Arron Banks, after fining the organisations a total of £120,000 for data protection violations during the EU referendum campaign…

Leave.EU was fined £15,000 for using Eldon Insurance customers’ details unlawfully to send almost 300,000 political marketing messages, and a further £45,000 for its part in sending an Eldon marketing campaign to political subscribers. Eldon was fined £60,000 for the latter violation…

The ICO will begin a full audit of Eldon and Leave.EU’s joint offices, staff and records, looking for evidence of whether or not the two companies followed data protection guidelines in processing personal information, how they trained staff and what policies and procedures they had in place. [The Guardian]

UPDATE: An appeal over one of the fines has been lost.

2 responses to “£120,000 fine for Leave.EU and Arron Banks’s insurance firm”

  1. … and yesterday Gerard Batten, leader of UKIP, had the cheek to write a letter to the Queen asking for her to suspend Parliament until after 29th March to ‘thwart Remainer MPs’. Surprisingly, apart from the ‘Grauniad’, this story hadn’t appeared in the UK press until the Express picked up on it this morning. Who’s trying to take back control?

    Also yesterday, the gaffe-prone Gerard Batten had to withdraw a tweet about the number of lorries using the Northern Irish border ( https://www.indy100.com/article/brexit-gerard-batten-ukip-tweet-uk-ireland-border-trade-backstop-eu-8756486 )

  2. The Aaron Banks/ Eldon story leads me to question the very small fines which are imposed on these law-breakers. £120,000 is just pocket money to people like Mr. Banks.

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