Electoral Funding: Unincorporated Associations

Debate between Brendan O'Hara and Martin Docherty-Hughes

Wednesday 27th February 2019 Westminster Hall

[Martin Docherty-Hughes (West Dunbartonshire) (SNP)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the role of unincorporated associations in electoral funding.

It is very good to see you in the Chair, Ms Dorries; I believe this is the first Westminster Hall debate I have participated in where you have been in the Chair.

I will introduce this somewhat obscure topic of the role of unincorporated associations in UK electoral funding by setting the scene. We begin in the Glasgow suburb of Clarkston, the type of place that is usually prefixed with “leafy”. As many hon. Members from Scottish constituencies, especially in the west, will know, it is composed of the mid-century, semi-detached houses that are a familiar sight across the west of Scotland and, I am sure, elsewhere. Anyone who has watched “Two Doors Down” on BBC Scotland might know what I am talking about.

In one of those houses lives a seemingly upstanding citizen by the name of Richard Cook, a former vice-chair of the Scottish Conservative party and former Scottish Conservative and Unionist candidate for East Renfrewshire. A cursory search turns up photos of Mr Cook with numerous Tory grandees, including the current leader of the Conservative and Unionist party in Scotland, Ruth Davidson, Member of the Scottish Parliament, and her interim replacement, Jackson Carlaw, the local MSP. There is also a photo of Mr Cook with the former Prime Minister, David Cameron, who came to East Renfrewshire to campaign for Mr Cook in 2010, in the election campaign that, as we all know, made Mr Cameron Prime Minister.

During that campaign, voters in East Renfrewshire were given an impression of a candidate in a Tory target seat who fitted the zeitgeist well—a waste management consultant who could almost have been hand-picked by Conservative campaign headquarters to represent the new, green Tories. His leaflets spoke about protecting green spaces and improving recycling.

Incredibly, during the campaign, the company that Mr Cook founded, DDR Recycling, was involved in a scam relating to the illegal shipment of waste tyres around the world, as confirmed by the Environment Agency in the UK. During investigations into those shipments, it was alleged that Mr Cook submitted false evidence to authorities in the United Kingdom and in the Republic of India investigating the case. That case is the loose thread that pulls apart the Scottish Conservative and Unionist candidate’s carefully managed public persona.

Thanks to the excellent work of investigative journalists such as Peter Geoghegan and Adam Ramsay at openDemocracy, we have been led carefully through a mystery tour of Mr Cook’s business dealings, which belied the conventional suburban milieu from which he came. DDR Recycling is now in liquidation, owing the UK taxpayer £150,000, but before that, it became embroiled in a Californian court case brought by an international haulage firm, which alleged $1.5 million of unpaid bills for waste shipments to South Korea.

That was only the beginning. Just before leaving DDR in 2014, Cook set up a company called Five Star Investment Management, with 75% of its shares held by the now late Prince Nawwaf bin Abdulaziz, a former head of Saudi Arabian intelligence, and the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United Kingdom. A third partner, a Danish national by the name of Peter Haestrup, had previously been involved in a gun-running scandal in the Republic of India. That is only a glimpse into a dazzling array of international deals, including another $1 billion environmental project in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, which looked to most trained observers like a litany of fraudulent deals.

[Brendan O'Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)]

While my hon. Friend wets his whistle, before he moves on from the role that journalists played in exposing the Constitutional Research Council and Mr Cook’s activities, will he acknowledge the role played by Jim Fitzpatrick of BBC Northern Ireland’s documentary series, “Spotlight”? His marvellous documentary, “Brexit, Dark Money and the DUP”, began this whole investigation and should be commended.