Hain rapped over donations row

Former Cabinet Minister Peter Hain has been found guilty of "serious and substantial" failures in not registering donations to his Labour deputy leadership campaign, according to the Commons Standards and Privileges Committee. As a result, Mr Hain said the Committee had accepted his mistakes were "honest", and he would be making an apology on the floor of the Commons. The mistakes were exposed in an article in the Guardian last year, which revealed that Mr Hain was being accused of not reporting £100,000 in contributions. It then emerged that a substantial portion of the funds were channelled through a non-operating think tank, the Progressive Policies Forum. The Committee's report dismissed the idea that Mr Hain's workload as Work and Pensions Secretary and Wales Secretary was an excuse for the errors. The report said: "This is a case of an experienced Member, a Cabinet Minister at the time, failing in his duty as a Member of Parliament to register donations within the time required by the House". It continued: "We understand that the pressures on Ministers and on frontbenchers can be onerous, but we cannot accept - and we are sure that none of them would suggest - that this excuses them from their obligations under the rules of the House." The report also states that these kind of failures would usually have attracted a "heavier penalty", but Mr Hain had already lost his job. It said: "Because of the seriousness and scale of this breach and noting the considerable, justified public concern that it has created, we would ordinarily have been minded to propose a heavier penalty. "However, we accept that there was no intention to deceive and Mr Hain has already paid a high price for his omissions."

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ITN | January 22, 2009

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