Marta & Nigel. The end of a not so beautiful relationship
You will recall that Marta Andreasen has CLEARLY stated that UKIP is bankrupt:
However today the party is bankrupt and so it has been for the last six months at least. The reasons are long but can roughly be summarized in the following:
1. The party has engaged in costly and unnecessary court cases resulting from Mr. Farage´s internal disagreements with colleagues or staff members; 2. The party has engaged in the costly and unnecessary promotion of by-elections where we had no chance at all of winning a seat; 3. The party has recruited staff over and above its capacity.
See: LINK
UKIP's leadership responded with the usual desperate attempts at spin. It was written by Hugh Williams (assistant treasurer) to Steve Crowther:
Dear Steve,
You have asked me, in my capacity as Assistant Treasurer to UKIP, and also in my role as a qualified Chartered Accountant of forty years standing, to comment on Marta Andreasen’s assertion that “Today the party is bankrupt and so it has been for the last six months at least.” She also talks about “abysmal mismanagement” in the party.
As a good friend of Marta’s, and as her publisher, I just wish she had approached me before making these damaging and inaccurate remarks.
It is essential that I refute these two remarks and I will try to be brief:
When I was elected to the party’s NEC, and before Nigel Farage was elected leader last autumn, and therefore before you were appointed Executive Chairman of UKIP, members of the NEC would rightly call for up-to-date financial information to be made available to them at the monthly meetings. However, even without sight of such timely management information, the party was clearly not in financial difficulty at the time because UKIP’s audited accounts to 31 December 2010 show that the party made a small profit and also had a healthy balance sheet.
However, since you have been appointed Executive Chairman (about six months ago), and since Stuart Wheeler has become Treasurer, I would say that UKIP’s financial status and reporting has been respectively healthy and admirable. For example, and unlike before Nigel Farage was re-elected leader, now:
· We have a Finance and Remuneration Committee charged with keeping the party’s finances in good order.
· That committee receives weekly reports of the party’s bank balance and the latest one, prepared six days ago, shows that we had a five figure sum in the bank after the payment of all current and short term debts. (I suspect there are some political parties that might be quite envious of such a declaration).
· At no stage since these documents have been prepared has the Treasurer, or I, had cause to think that the party was even close to bankruptcy.
· The NEC is always presented with the latest of these statements at their monthly meetings.
· The NEC is also presented with a statement of how the party’s finances have fared over the past three months and how things look for the next three months.
· There is now a system for controlling expenditure. Marta makes specific mention of legal fees; these are now under a special system of control. So, again, if Marta had only asked me first I could have told her that she would be ill-advised to attack the party leader on that basis.
· There is a highly competent team that keeps the financial records at our Head Office. I keep telling them how proud I am of them and how grateful we all are for their efforts and great efficiency.
I hope that I have said enough to refute Marta’s assertions but I would like to add two other things: firstly, she talks about “abysmal mismanagement” and I trust that the above points show that she is quite wrong to level that accusation against the party. Secondly, I know of at least one Europhile Chartered Accountant who is aware of how UKIP runs its finances and who has unhesitatingly agreed that the party’s book-keeping seems to be in remarkably good order.
In short, I am at a loss as to where Marta has got her information from, because it is definitely MIS-information. It is particularly misinformation with regard to the past six months that she specifies. I reckon the party’s finances are in extremely good order and, to the extent that I am a member of the Finance and Remuneration Committee, I would like to express my thanks to all of them for this significant achievement; in particular, it is such an improvement over what I noticed when first elected to the NEC last Summer.
Lastly, when Marta calls last week’s election results “bad”, I have to disagree. I have two simple statistics to produce in support of my view:
1. In 2007, when the same local seats down here were last contested, UKIP was scoring one vote against ten for the major parties. Last week that had improved to one vote in three. An impressive improvement by any standard.
2. The other statistic is that, in the case of my home patch, Plymouth, since last week’s elections, UKIP has now risen to become the third party in that city.
As I say, Marta is a friend of mine and I do not like taking issue with her in public but loyalty to my party must come first and, when I find such statements being made which are patently false, as well as damaging, I unhesitatingly show my loyalty to the party by refuting them. As a former party treasurer and elected MEP she really should have known better and would be well advised to withdraw them, and also withdraw them from her website.
Yours sincerely
Hugh Williams
Assistant Treasurer UKIP
It is interesting to note that Mr Williams was thrown out of his own UKIP Branch as chairman for corruption - including colluding with Malcolm Wood to out manoeuvre the decisions of the Branch Committee. Hardy a man whose word can be trusted!
And this is Marta's blog response. She was clearly unimpressed! We just love the last paragraph!
Hugh Williams forwarded to me a statement where he calls my comments in respect of the party´s finances “patently false” and he refutes them.
The “mis-information” -as Hugh calls it- about the party´s financial status, came from Nigel himself on such terms and more than once.
As I do not have the chance to see the party´s accounting records, at this point I have to rely on Hugh´s opinion.
Appointed assistant Treasurer two months ago, Hugh seems to have grasped the financial situation very quickly and appears to know better than the leader of the party. I have therefore to conclude that Nigel´s comment to me may not respond to reality, in which case I withdraw my reference to it.
In fact looking at the huge number of staff Nigel recruits in the UK and in Brussels and relating it to the 9 UKIP councillors that were elected out of 9,300 seats, I should have realized that the party enjoyed a more than comfortable financial situation! Apologies!!!
Also see: LINK
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