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Liberal foundation helps MP with legal fees

24 March 2016 18:53

Alistair Carmichael outside the Court of Session in Edinburgh last December where he won his case but was told he had to pay his own legal costs.

NORTHERN isles MP Alistair Carmichael is to receive £50,000 from a political trust with strong connections to his Liberal Democrat party towards his legal bill fighting a court case that aimed to unseat him last year.

It emerged on Thursday that in January the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust (JRRT) paid £34,000 of the estimated £155,000 Carmichael owes lawyers for fighting his case in the election court, with another £16,000 to follow this month.

Four Orkney constituents had challenged the Liberal Democrat MP’s election in May last year after he admitted lying about leaking a memo in order to undermine the SNP.

While his challengers raised more than £210,000 to cover their legal fees through a crowdfunding campaign, a similar effort has raised over £15,000 for Carmichael.

The judges decided not to award the MP his legal expenses despite the fact he won after the case demonstrated that he had lied for political ends.

Joseph Rowntree, the Quaker and Liberal businessman who made a fortune manufacturing sweets and set up three trusts to tackle poverty and other social problems of his day.

The JRRT is a private company founded by the same Yorkshire confectioner, philanthropist and Liberal who created the well known Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

The trust says it will be donating a total of £1.2 million towards political campaigns during the course of this year and has in the past made donations to individuals and organisations within “all three major parties”. The Carmichael donation is the only one received by an individual this year.

Four of the trust’s directors, including chairman and former MP Nick Harvey, are Liberals or Liberal Democrats.

In a statement the trust said it helped Carmichael because it wanted to protect MPs from personal bankruptcy if they faced a similar “vexatious and highly political” legal challenges and to resist the rise of the SNP.

The statement said: “Thanks to the perversities of the UK’s electoral system, the 50 per cent of Scottish voters who supported unionist parties at the general election are represented by only three MPs.

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“Had nationalists succeeded in their case against Alistair Carmichael, they would have worsened further the current misrepresentation of Scottish voters’ views in parliament.

“Worse still, the effect on case law would have been to subject many more legitimately elected members of parliament to the risk of personal bankruptcy in defending themselves in court against vexatious and highly political claims.”

The trust did not comment on the fact that its own website states that it will not pay for legal fees.