# Shahmir Sanni **Shahmir Sanni** is the British whistleblower who in **March 2018** exposed how the official Brexit campaign, [[Vote Leave]], routed money through a nominally independent youth group, [[BeLeave]], to get around its spending limit. He took his account to [[Carole Cadwalladr]] and *The Observer*, and to Channel 4 News. "Vote Leave cheated," he said. "There was no time where anything BeLeave did didn't go through Stephen," meaning Stephen Parkinson, then a senior Vote Leave official. ## What he exposed In the campaign's last ten days, Vote Leave gave **£625,000** to BeLeave and its founder, Darren Grimes. BeLeave spent more than **£675,000** with AggregateIQ, the Canadian data firm tied to [[Cambridge Analytica]], under what investigators called a "common plan." Counted properly, Vote Leave's spending was **£7,449,079** against a legal limit of £7 million. The Electoral Commission ruled on **17 July 2018**: - **Vote Leave** was fined £61,000. - **Darren Grimes** was fined £20,000, the maximum. - Grimes and Vote Leave's David Halsall were referred to the Metropolitan Police. Vote Leave dropped its appeal in March 2019. Grimes won his personal appeal in July 2019, but the findings against Vote Leave stood. See [[Vote Leave Overspend]], [[Dominic Cummings]]. ## The retaliation Parkinson, by then political secretary to Prime Minister Theresa May, issued a statement through Number 10 disclosing his past 18-month relationship with Sanni. That outed Sanni before he had told his family in Pakistan. The statement was widely condemned as retaliation against a whistleblower; Sanni later said May had "weaponised my sexuality." See [[Queer Liberation]]. He then lost his job at the TaxPayers' Alliance, a free-market pressure group. He sued, crowdfunding more than £52,000. In **November 2018** the Alliance **conceded liability in full**: unfair and wrongful dismissal, direct discrimination, and dismissal over his "philosophical belief in the sanctity of British democracy." His public activity since 2019 could not be confirmed for this page. ## See Also - [[Vote Leave Overspend]] · [[Vote Leave]] · [[BeLeave]] · [[Brexit]] - [[Carole Cadwalladr]] · [[Dominic Cummings]] · [[Cambridge Analytica]]