A HIGH-profile No campaign group has been penalised after failing to file any accounts, the Sunday Herald can reveal.
No Borders, which spent almost £150,000 defending the Union during the independence referendum, should have lodged its first financial records with Companies House before Christmas.
However, it is now red flagged as having “accounts overdue”, meaning an automatic penalty.
No Borders was the highest-spending non-party No campaign after Better Together, spending £147,510 on videos, a specially commissioned song, and the VoteNoBorders.co.uk website.
Its outlay was just shy of the £150,000 maximum allowed in the last 16 weeks of the poll.
No Borders was founded Greenock-born millionaire Malcolm Offord with the aim of promoting the views of ordinary people rather than “politicians shouting at each other”.
A Greenock-born financier who had previously donated £100,000 to the Tories, Offord claimed the project was non-political and grassroots in nature.
However, most of its £125,000 in registered donations came from established party donors – £20,000 from Offord, £50,000 from banking firm Stalbury Trustees, another Tory donor, and £25,000 from an arm of whisky distillers William Grant & Sons, which has donated to Labour.
No Borders also paid £3000 to Professor Adam Tomkins of Glasgow University for 12 website articles – Tomkins is now the top Holyrood list candidate for the Tories in Glasgow.
Offord registered No Borders as a “permitted participant” in the referendum in March 2014.
His partner in the exercise was Fiona Gilmore, head of London PR firm Acanchi, which was ultimately paid more than £30,000 by No Borders for its work in the campaign.
Around the same time, Offord and Gilmore also registered No Borders as a private company with themselves as the directors.
The company’s stated objective was to “campaign against independence in relation to the Scottish Independence Referendum 2014”.
Offord resigned as a director of the firm in January 2015, but Gilmore remains a director, leaving her responsible for the company’s accounts.
The automatic penalty for failing to file accounts on time starts at £150 for the first month, then climbs steeply over time, with companies being struck off if the problem persists.
The incident is another embarrassment for No Borders, which has a controversial history.
Days after being launched in May 2014 it was forced to suspend the comments on its website, after its video testimonials from people defending the Union were brutally mocked online.
No Borders was also forced to withdraw a cinema advert which suggested sick Scots children might not be treated at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital after independence.
“They can join the long list of foreigners waiting to be seen,” one of the actors in the ad said.
The NHS trust which runs the hospital said it had not been consulted, regularly treated patients from other countries, and requested that the advert be removed from cinemas.
An SNP spokesman said: “Vote No Borders were amongst the highest spending campaigning organisations in the No campaign – it is surprising that they have failed to properly comply with company rules. They should publish all the information required as soon as possible.”
Companies House confirmed the company had been sent a reminder that its accounts were due and would be subject to an automatic late filing penalty.
A spokesman said the penalty would rise to £350 if the accounts were not filed by mid-January.
Gilmore did not respond to calls or emails.
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