The Electoral Commission is to appeal the ruling that UKIP should only pay back £18,481 of the £367,697 donations it recieved in good faith that later turned out to be unacceptable.

The largest part of the contested amount is a donation from Alan Brown, a retired bookmaker, who was taken off the electoral register without his knowledge for a 12 month period.  Another smaller part of the money is a donation was from a company in the Isle of Man which is considered to be a foreign donation under electoral law.

The Electoral Commission said “As it is the first time that the law on forfeiture of impermissible donations has been tested in court, we believe it is important to clarify the law in this area.”  The reason why it has never been tested before is because they didn’t take the Lib Dems or Tories to court over their recent illegal donations which were both far more substantial and taken in much more dubious circumstances but instead decided to pick on UKIP in what can only be a deliberate attempt to bankrupt the party.

The rules on accepting foreign donations were designed to stop parties from accepting large amounts of money from overseas and were brought in as a result of allegations of bribery and corruption against the “big three”, not UKIP or any of the other small parties.