Saturday, January 12, 2008

Is Brown's Electoral Commission submission complete?

Here's an interesting thing, anyone remember the Gordon Brown leadership website domain registrations and Silverfish from early in 2007? Well, why is it that Silverfish do not appear on Brown's Electoral Commission submission as a benefit in kind?

The domain, along with all the others that were originally registered (and Silverfish said they intended to sell) are still registered to Rachel Bull at Silverfish. Also there were quite a few videos on Gordon's campaign website and videos are not free to produce now are they? Who was likely to have filmed them? Couldn't be a production company called Silverfish could it?

Could this potentially mean Brown received non-cash donations above the value of £1000 and he's failed to declare them in his non-cash submissions on the Electoral Commission website? Everyone is so busy looking at Hain's donations and records, perhaps they should be looking at Brown's too?

Update: It's been noted domains are cheap as chips, which is true. However the plethora of registrations were, according to Silverfish at the time, carried out with the intention of selling at a profit to Brown later. So their value once registered would have increased somewhat. Of course, if Silverfish were fibbing about them being speculative profit purchases then the point about their cheapness stands, and so Team Brown lied to the press about the domains all those months ago when they denied all knowledge.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

In relation to the £1000 limit, it's worth noting that domain names cost a pittance these days £10 each tops for a .com. Web hosting would be around £25 a month. Perhaps the Silverfish contribution was well beneath the threshold for the Register?

Alex said...

Well the domain names/hosting presumably don't cost that much but the website content and films would have cost what £250-£350 per person per day to produce.

Jon Worth said...

I think you've put 2 and 2 together here and made 10. Silverfish registered the domain names, but they did not actually design the website or program any of it.

So unless registration of a couple of domain names is worth £1000 (I think not) then I think they (and Brown) are in the clear...

Francesca Preece said...

As if Brown would abide by the rules. What about all that money he hoarded away- our money may I add - for use in the election-that-never-was in 2007?

I highly doubt he's put it back into the public mill.

Dizzy you should also make a fuss about the fact that Gordy and his chums have cleared out the country's gold reserves.

Anonymous said...

I agree with jon about the 2+2=10 point

Give a blogger some random information and he will come up with a damning conclusion 9 times out of ten.

You try too hard to imply guilt without even trying to ascertain the truth.

Questioning the value and source of the domain names is a fair point but why then try to imply videos were done by silverfish and that this was inappropriate? do you have any grounds for suspecting 1. they made the videos, 2 the videos were gifts as opposed to purchases, 3 the videos were of any great value anyway as all the onesi saw were cheapo webcasts

dreamingspire said...

Certainly there was a market in domain names, but it seems to have gone quiet. However, they seem to exist in a legal limbo, because you don't own them in the normal sense of the word, because if you fail to re-register you lose them (as I nearly did with one after the agent stopped operating and the registrar refused to do anything until very nearly too late for me - then the agent charged me lots of money to rescue the domain).

tory boys never grow up said...

As you said in your Andrew Brown posting you only need "The potential for raising the possibility of sleaze, however tenuous". Given previous comments I think that your remarks should be interpreted in this context.


BTW I do my shopping at Sainsbury's so I'm bound to ties into the evil Labour cash nexus.

Anonymous said...

Gordon will use the hain defence "I was to busy running the countrys finances no criminal intent bla bla bla..."
see its easy when the rules dont apply to you.

Chris Paul said...

This is pure and idle speculation. It was a crappy site really. No contest, no content.

Meanwhile how about the other Mail story about Sir George O and other Shadowys hiding donations to their offices?

I don't trust Hain and never have. Certainly didn't waste a vote on him. Not even 6th preference. He shouldn't be a minister IMO anyway. He is unreliable in the extreme IMO. But the Osborne et al avoidance is arguably a far greater problem than a late declaration or even a putative anonymising organisation, rather like the Tory MIC as it goes.

Has been going on for yonks too. Comment please.

Anonymous said...

Silverfish in kind or not, what on earth did he spend over £200k on when there wasn't even a contest ????????????

Has anyone seen accounts for this ?

Where is the £30k donation to the Labour party ?