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Arron Banks staff worked on Brexit campaign, MPs told

Call centre employees at insurance companies owned by Brexit campaign financier ‘actively worked on Leave campaign’

Paul Lewis, David Pegg and Paul Hilder Tue 17 Apr 2018 12.57 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/apr/17/arron-banks-staff-worked-on-brexit-campaign-mps-told

A former Cambridge Analytica employee has alleged that insurance companies belonging to Arron Banks, a key financier in the Brexit campaign, were used as part of the campaign to leave the European Union.

Brittany Kaiser, the former business development director of Cambridge Analytica, told a UK parliamentary committee that she saw “with my own eyes” employees of Eldon Insurance staffing a call centre working for Leave.EU.

The former director, who first came forward to the Guardian last month, said she spent a day at the company’s headquarters around November 2015 investigating the possibility of Cambridge Analytica working for Leave.EU, and discovered the insurance company’s call centre workers “actively working on the Leave.EU campaign”.

The call centre comprised of a room containing at least 20 callers, she said. “They all had a computer, and a headset, making calls that I assume were normally sales calls, or calls for customer assistance and advice, and instead they were calling people to undertake a survey – they were talking to those people about their interests in leaving the European Union and issues around Brexit.”

She added: “All of the staff there were employed by an insurance company. Almost none of the staff there knew anything about political campaigning. A lot of what I said to them and what I presented to them was novel. They had never heard of any of these tactics. They had never participated in politics before, and openly said: ‘I work for an insurance company, so: help.’”

Kaiser said she and a Cambridge Analytica colleague gave advice on how to improve the survey methodology. “I was under the impression, by what they told me, that every single individual that they were pulling up to call was actually a lead or a current customer of Eldon Insurance or Go Skippy.”

She added: “They had probably already been doing that around a month or two.”

The disclosure raises further questions about comments made by Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s former communications director, in which he described how the campaign used insurance actuaries to identify prime locations for political campaigning.

Emma Briant provided the committee with recordings of interviews she conducted as part of her academic research on propaganda. Among them was an interview with Wigmore, in which he said: “We had four actuaries, which we said: ‘Right, tell us what this looks like from our data.’ They [the actuaries] are the ones that pinpointed 12 areas in the United Kingdom that we needed to send Nigel Farage to.”

Wigmore told the Guardian that no actuaries had been employed by the campaign. Kaiser also told the committee that Banks set up a company called Big Data Dolphins, which she said was working with a data science team at the University of Mississippi, after he ceased negotiations with Cambridge Analytica. Kaiser questioned whether the data of British citizens “was sent abroad, specifically to Mississippi” for processing by Big Data Dolphins.

Leave.EU attacked Kaiser’s evidence as “a confused litany of lies and allegations” and said that Eldon Insurance did not share data with anyone. “No data has been sent to Mississippi. The unit is still in the planning stage, it employs no one and is not operational,” the group said.

Kaiser’s written testimony also refers to a Cambridge Analytica invoice to Ukip revealed by the Observer at the weekend. According to Kaiser’s testimony, the invoice for £41,500 was first issued to Leave.EU, but Banks declined to pay it.

An invoice of the same value was issued to Ukip, and Banks told the Observer that he had made a donation to the party to cover the cost of the bill. However, Ukip said it never paid Cambridge Analytica. It is unclear whether the invoice was ever settled.

Kaiser also told the committee she had seen documents in which Nigel Oakes, the co-founder of the SCL Group, and the head of its defence division, revealed the company’s audience-targeting methodology was for several years “export-controlled by the British government”.

“That would mean that the methodology was considered a weapon,” she said. “Weapons-grade communications tactics – which means we had to tell the British government if that was going to be deployed in another country outside the United Kingdom.” She said the designation from the UK government was removed in 2015.

Among the documents provided to the committee by Kaiser is a legal opinion drafted in support of a proposal for Ukip to share data with Cambridge Analytica.

One of the authors of that opinion, Philip Coppel QC, last month represented Cambridge Analytica in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) from obtaining a warrant to raid the company’s premises.

Kaiser’s testimony also threatens to raise further questions for Facebook after she said that far more people than previously understood may have had their data harvested from the site.

Lawyers for Alexander Nix, the chief executive of Cambridge Analytica who was suspended from his position last month, told the committee that he would not appear because he was a subject in an active ICO investigation.

The information commissioner said: “We have written to Mr Nix to invite him to be interviewed by our investigators. Our investigation is looking at whether criminal and civil offences have been committed under the Data Protection Act.”

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/apr/17/arron-banks-staff-worked-on-brexit-campaign-mps-told