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The Electoral Commission has dismissed a request by the Conservatives to reopen an investigation into undeclared donations to Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and Labour Together, saying they found “no evidence of any other potential offences”.
The organisation, where Mr McSweeney was director before coming to work for Sir Keir, was fined by the elections watchdog over its handling of £740,000 donations in 2021.
But the Tories had claimed a leaked email from a lawyer to Mr McSweeney had sought to mislead the Electoral Commission.
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The verdict from the Electoral Commission will come as a relief to the beleaguered prime minister, who had been facing growing pressure over the allegations against one of his closest allies in Downing Street.
Earlier this week, the Conservatives published a 2021 email from Labour lawyer Gerald Shamash to Mr McSweeney discussing how to handle the Electoral Commission.
In it, Mr Shamash questioned Mr McSweeney about the reasons for not reporting the donations and suggested “it may be better if LT [Labour Together] cannot deal substantively with questions I pose then perhaps best to simply base our case as to the non‐reporting down as admin error”.
The commission found a series of breaches by the group for failing to declare almost £740,000 in donations under Mr McSweeney’s watch and hit it with a £14,250 fine in September 2021.
Tory chair Kevin Hollinrake claimed the legal advice to Mr McSweeney “shows how authorities may have been misled over hundreds of thousands of pounds of donations used to install Starmer as Labour leader”.
He said: “We believe there is a strong public interest in revealing the full truth to the public about possible criminal wrongdoing.
“The prime minister was elected on a pledge to restore honesty and integrity in politics, but time and again he has deceived the public and put his party before our national interest.”
In a letter to the Electoral Commission, he said the implication of leaked emails was that Labour Together “chose not to report those donations” to stop the then Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party knowing “who was bankrolling their secretive political campaigning, and to keep their work below the political radar”.
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But an Electoral Commission spokesperson said: “We have thoroughly reviewed this information and found no evidence of any other potential offences. We are confident that the initial determination and sanction were appropriate.
“We are therefore not reopening the investigation.”
They added that Labour Together’s initial fine had been “significant” and reflected “the seriousness of the offences determined, for which no reasonable excuse was put forward”.
Work and pensions secretary Pat McFadden on Wednesday said the Conservatives were targeting Mr McSweeney because he is a “very talented man”.
A Labour Together spokesperson said it had “proactively raised concerns about its own reporting of donations to the Electoral Commission in 2020” and the outcome of the investigation was public knowledge.
