In May 2011, three days before the referendum vote, The Guardian newspaper released an analysis of the accounts of donations to the campaign, showing that it been funded almost exclusively by Conservative Party donors. 42 of the 53 named donors to the NoToAV campaign were Conservative Party donors, having given between them £18.4 million to the Conservative Party since 2001. Nine were not identifiable from official donor records, another source was identified as official funding from the Electoral Commission, and one was a Labour Party donor, the GMB union. Among the donors to and prominent members of the Conservative Party were seven Conservative peers, including Lord Sainsbury of Preston Candover, who had donated nearly £3m to the Conservative Party since 2005. Jonathan Wood, who was the biggest shareholder in Northern Rock bank when it collapsed in 2007 and later tried to sue the then Labour government over its handling of the bank's nationalization, and Lord Fink, the Conservative Party's co-treasurer, British fund manager and former CEO and deputy chairman of the Man Group plc, have both donated £75,000 between them to the campaign in 2011. Stockbroking and corporate finance group Shore Capital donated £25,000, hedge fundOdey Asset Management Group, founded by Crispin Odey in 1991, donated £20,000; Lord Wolfson, chairman of the clothing chain Next plc gave £25,000; John Nash, co-founder of private equity firmSovereign Capital and chairman of the healthcare company Care UK, donated £25,000. The figures obtained by the Guardian do not include donations received by the NoToAV campaign prior to the passing of the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011 by Parliament in February 2011.
Campaign criticism
The NotoAV campaign attracted criticism in the run up to the referendum, due to its repeated claims that implementing AV would be expensive, due to the necessity of installing electronic voting machines. The claim was denied, both by the opposing campaign and the Electoral Commission and Political Studies Association. In April 2011, cabinet minister Chris Huhnethreatened legal action over alleged untruths disseminated by Conservatives opposed to the alternative vote system. On the day of the referendum, it was reported in the New Statesman that David Blunkett had admitted that the claim that introducing the AV system would be more expensive had been exaggerated.
