The interview this morning with Arron Banks on the Andrew Marr show seemed to argue that the company which he owns, called Rock Services was the source of around £8M for the funding of vote Leave. However the image shown here from Experian website argues very differently. I confess I am opposed to our departure from the EU, and I am no investigator. However like many SME businesses I do have access to Experian to check out how credible companies are so that when we are invited to work with other companies we can assess their capabilities before we make a decision to do so.

 In the light of this mornings snapshot of Rock Services as shown above, they are not a company we would choose to work with. The fact that they show they have a score of 49 out of 100 and that it is an Above Average Risk would usually be the marker we would first have concerns about. Just to put it into context we are a SME and our score is 88 and this calls us a low risk. Then when it comes to the credit rating Rock Services is given a £120,000 credit rating which on the face of it seems a great deal, however when compared to their turnover in 2017 this represents 0.2% of their turnover. Our credit rating on the other hand represents 0.54% of our turnover. Also their credit limit is 1.5 times their credit rating while our credit limit is 2.6 times our credit rating so on all three of these factors, Rock Services is a great deal less robust than our business, even though it is around 36 times bigger than ours.

 All of this can be put to one side though as we consider if Arron Banks is actually telling the truth. The last elements of this display show that his words are full of abject nonsense. In order to make a donation to a political campaign, a business needs to make some pre tax profit as donations to political campaigns must come out of the post tax profit. Now of course businesses may wish to diminish their profit to reduce their tax bill, but Arron’s business makes 0.05%-0.1% pre tax profit which is a great deal smaller than any businesses would aim for. In addition they made a loss in 2016 that represents around 0.8% of that years turnover so they will need to wait 10 years before they even have any profit, let alone the £8m that he claims he has paid out from the business. Indeed even if 2016 was a complete blip and could be ignored, it would take around 150 years for Rock Services to generate £8m in pre tax profits

There are two directors of Rock Services, the other is a lady called Elizabeth Bilney who was the CEO of Vote Leave. The parent company of Rock Services is the Rock Holdings company which is based in the Isle of Man and so this is a company that cannot be viewed through Experian so of course that may tell a very different story, but based on this evidence, Mr Banks was talking nonsense!