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Pro-Brexit campaign and insurance company face fines of £135,000 over breaches of data laws

The ICO, said Aaron Banks, had found “we may have accidentally sent a newsletter to customers” but “no evidence of a grand data conspiracy”.

Pro-Brexit campaign group Leave.EU and an insurance company owned by its founder Aaron Banks face total fines of £135,000 over breaches of data laws. It follows an Information Commissioner investigation into the misuse of personal data by political campaigns.

The report says more than a million emails sent to Leave.EU subscribers contained marketing for the Eldon Insurance firm's GoSkippy services. Mr Banks defended himself on Twitter after the report's release.

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), he said, had found “we may have accidentally sent a newsletter to customers” but “no evidence of a grand data conspiracy”.

He added: “Gosh we communicated with our supporters and offered them a 10% Brexit discount after the vote! So what?”

The UK voted by 51.9% to 48.1% to leave the EU in a referendum in June 2016.

Since then there have been several investigations looking at how the different campaigns were run, including into how they were funded and how they used personal data.

For its report, the Information Commissioner has been looking at how political campaigns use personal data to “micro target” voters. The ICO said this had been the “most complex data protection investigation” it had ever carried out, with “an abundance of claims and allegations played out in public”.

It said it had uncovered a “disturbing disregard for voters' personal privacy”.

The investigation was initially prompted by reports in The Observer about the activities of data firm Cambridge Analytica, which was accused of improperly harvesting millions of Facebook accounts.

The ICO said it had identified “serious breaches of data protection principles” and would have issued a “substantial fine” if the company had not already been in administration.

The report says that Leave.EU and Cambridge Analytica did not pursue a working relationship once Leave.EU failed to obtain designation as the official leave campaign for the 2016 referendum.

It said Leave.EU had explored creating a new organization with a “view to collecting and analysing large quantities of data for political purposes”, but there was no evidence this had ever functioned.

Elsewhere in the report, it highlights what it says is the close relationship between Leave.EU and Eldon Insurance. Both organizations face fines of £60,000 for emails which breached data laws.

The ICO said over a million emails between February and July 2017 had been sent to Leave.EU subscribers, including marketing information about GoSkippy, without their consent.