Award of honours returns to haunt Labour’s donations scandal

From today’s Scotland on Sunday:

THE businessman at the centre of the Wendy Alexander donation scandal was backed for an honour by senior figures in the Labour Party, it emerged last night.

MSP Charlie Gordon, who resigned last week as Labour’s transport spokesman after it emerged he arranged an illegal donation from Jersey tycoon Paul Green, has now admitted he earlier supported the same businessman for an unspecified honour.

Oops.

Meanwhile, the Sunday Herald – which has been leading the way in investigating the Wendy Alexander donation story – reports evidence that questions over Paul Green’s donations were covered-up:

Alexander’s team is facing damaging charges that its members knew her campaign donation from tax exile Paul Green was suspect three weeks ago. According to her secret list of donors, of which the Sunday Herald has a hard copy, Green’s cash was flagged up as being questionable as early as November 5. The document was created on a computer registered to “Brian Ashcroft”, Alexander’s husband.

This contradicts the claim made by Tom McCabe – Alexander’s campaign manager – that she was made aware of a personal, rather than corporate, donation from Green last Thursday…

The Sunday Herald has obtained a printed copy of Alexander’s full list of secret donors, which names each contributor, how much was given, as well as the campaign member from whom it was solicited.

According to the “properties” tab in the Microsoft Word document, “Brian Ashcroft”, Alexander’s husband, is named as the “author”. This means the document was created on a computer registered in his name.

There is a key leap in the evidence there – from assuming that what was done using a version of Word registered in the name of “Brian Ashcroft” would have been known about by Wendy Alexander (husbands and wives don’t tell each other everything, and anyway, I bet that a noticeable proportion of people reading this posting are using a version of Word that is registered under someone else’s name).

The full Sunday Herald story does though have further evidence of murky goings on. And – just as with the English angle on the donations story – the initial firm denials about senior politicians knowing anything was wrong are unravelling.