{"id":831829,"date":"2021-09-30T14:29:05","date_gmt":"2021-09-30T18:29:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=831829"},"modified":"2021-09-30T14:29:06","modified_gmt":"2021-09-30T18:29:06","slug":"terry-mcauliffe-campaign-took-350k-from-us-based-company-owned-by-british-national","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/terry-mcauliffe-campaign-took-350k-from-us-based-company-owned-by-british-national\/","title":{"rendered":"Terry McAuliffe Campaign Took $350K From US-Based Company Owned by British National"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">24<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fterry-mcauliffe-campaign-took-350k-from-us-based-company-owned-by-british-national%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=831829&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div readability=\"29.729032258065\">\n\t\t\t<span class=\"article-category\"><a class href=\"https:\/\/freebeacon.com\/democrats\/\">Democrats<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"article-excerpt\">Donation could run afoul of federal law that prohibits taking money from foreign nationals<\/p>\n<figure class=\"post-thumbnail-container relative lg:mr-24 w-full my-4 mb-8\">\n\t\t<img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" width=\"736\" height=\"514\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/GettyImages-1233344591.jpg\" class=\"w-full lazyload blur-up wp-post-image\" alt=\"Terry McAuliffe\" srcset=\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 736px) 100vw, 736px\" data-srcset=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/GettyImages-1233344591.jpg 736w, https:\/\/freebeacon.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/GettyImages-1233344591-300x210.jpg 300w, https:\/\/freebeacon.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/GettyImages-1233344591-703x491.jpg 703w\" data-sizes=\"auto\" \/><figcaption class=\"absolute text-white p-4 w-full text-right text-xs bottom-0 bg-black opacity-75\">\n\t\t\t\tDemocratic Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe \/ Getty Images\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>\t\t\t<span class=\"text-gray text-xs md:text-lg\"><a href=\"https:\/\/freebeacon.com\/author\/alana-goodman\/\" title=\"Posts by Alana Goodman\" class=\"author url fn text-red-700\" rel=\"author\">Alana Goodman<\/a> \u2022 September 30, 2021 2:20 pm<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n<div readability=\"140.63038548753\">\n<p>Virginia Democrat Terry McAuliffe&#8217;s gubernatorial campaign in July raked in $350,000 from a mysterious, New Jersey-based telecom company owned by a Sri Lankan-British national, a donation that could run afoul of federal laws that prohibit candidates from taking money from foreign nationals.<\/p>\n<p>LycaTel, a discount calling card provider, boasts a complicated web of offshore businesses and has been the subject of tax-fraud and money-laundering allegations overseas. The company is owned by Sri Lankan-born British national Allirajah Subaskaran, who holds 99 percent of the company&#8217;s shares through his London-based company, WWW Holding Company Ltd., according to U.K. corporate records reviewed by the <em>Washington Free Beacon<\/em>. In a Federal Communications Commission filing in August, Subaskaran describes himself as &#8220;a natural person and Citizen of the United Kingdom&#8221; and lists his U.S. business office as the same address and phone number as LycaTel.<\/p>\n<p>The company does not appear to have contributed to previous Virginia campaigns or federal races. LycaTel in July retained D.C.-based Thompson International Group to lobby on &#8220;Telecom&#8221; issues, according to disclosure records. Before that, the Thompson International Group had registered as a foreign agent that represented Subaskaran as part of a &#8220;business expansion within the U.S.A.,&#8221; according to records filed with the Department of Justice.<\/p>\n<p>LycaTel&#8217;s contribution is one of the largest received by McAuliffe&#8217;s gubernatorial campaign this election cycle. Ethics experts say the donation raises foreign-influence red flags. It&#8217;s also reigniting questions about McAuliffe&#8217;s previous foreign-donor controversies. The FBI in 2016 reportedly opened an investigation into a $120,000 donation McAuliffe received from a company owned by&nbsp;Wang Wenliang, a Chinese citizen and U.S. green card holder who served as a delegate to China&#8217;s parliament.<\/p>\n<p>LycaTel did not respond to emailed questions. When reached by phone on Thursday, LycaTel&#8217;s general counsel said the company had no comment and was &#8220;waiting to hear back from management as to what they want to disclose and what they don&#8217;t.&#8221; A lawyer for Subaskaran did not respond to a request for comment. McAuliffe&#8217;s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n<p>The Federal Election Commission prohibits campaigns from accepting money from foreign nationals and entities. While U.S.-based subsidiaries of foreign corporations can contribute, the donation can&#8217;t be made under the direction of the company&#8217;s foreign leadership\u2014which legal experts said can be a murky legal distinction.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;This is effectively a really easy way to launder foreign money into the U.S. political process and to avoid the FEC prohibition on foreign nationals making contributions in U.S. elections,&#8221; said Ben Freeman, director of the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy.<\/p>\n<p>Freeman said the McAuliffe campaign&#8217;s decision to accept such a large donation from a foreign-linked source was also troubling from an ethics perspective.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Three-hundred-fifty-thousand dollars to Terry McAuliffe, that&#8217;s a huge sum of money, even by campaign finance standards,&#8221; said Freeman. &#8220;If I was a part of that campaign, or if I was any way connected to that, I&#8217;m not going to accept that money because I don&#8217;t want even the semblance that we have foreign influence on my campaign. If I was them, I&#8217;d give the money back.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Tom Anderson, the director of the Government Integrity Project at the National Legal and Policy Center, said his organization was concerned about the size and source of the donation.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;McAuliffe probably has one of the most prolific dark money machines in politics but brazenly soliciting and accepting $350,000 from a foreign source is crossing a very bright red line in our opinion,&#8221; said Anderson.<\/p>\n<p>Subaskaran, through his WWW Holding Company and other entities, owns a globe-spanning web of companies in the technology, media, and gaming sectors, many of them with the word &#8220;Lyca&#8221; in the names. The Lyca network is so complicated that its accounting firm, KPMG, acknowledged in a corporate filing that it was unable to account for $134 million on the balance sheet due to the &#8220;complex nature of the related party structure the company operates within,&#8221;&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/money\/2016\/may\/11\/lycamobiles-tax-affairs-confounding-its-own-auditors\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">according<\/a>&nbsp;to the <em>Guardian<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>The Lyca group has also come under scrutiny for its financial activities overseas. LycaMobile is one of the largest donors to the United Kingdom&#8217;s Conservative Party but has&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/money\/2020\/feb\/02\/major-tory-donor-lycamobile-embroiled-in-three-disputes-with-hmrc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">clashed<\/a>&nbsp;with British authorities over allegations of unpaid taxes. French authorities in 2016&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/news\/article-3649301\/Offices-Conservative-Party-s-biggest-donor-Lycamobile-raided-French-police-nine-people-charged-suspicion-money-laundering-tax-fraud.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">raided<\/a>&nbsp;LycaMobile&#8217;s Paris headquarters and arrested &#8220;19 people suspected of being involved in a money-laundering system implicating Lycamobile and Lycamobile Services,&#8221; according to a&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/news\/article-3649301\/Offices-Conservative-Party-s-biggest-donor-Lycamobile-raided-French-police-nine-people-charged-suspicion-money-laundering-tax-fraud.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">statement<\/a>&nbsp;from French prosecutors.<\/p>\n<p>LycaMobile couriers in 2015 were photographed transporting tote bags of cash\u2014reportedly as much as $1 million per week\u2014to various post offices around the United Kingdom, according to a series of articles by <em>BuzzFeed<\/em>. LycaMobile denied any wrongdoing related to the deposits and noted that it operates a cash-heavy business.<\/p>\n<p>LycaTel&#8217;s operations in the United States have come under scrutiny as well. The Federal Communications Commission in 2011 fined the company $5 million for &#8220;deceptively marketing prepaid calling cards&#8221; to largely immigrant buyers. The company reportedly claimed the low-cost cards could be used to make &#8220;hundreds of minutes of calls&#8221; overseas, but buyers were only able to use &#8220;a fraction of those minutes for calls, because LycaTel applies a variety of fees and surcharges that quickly deplete the card,&#8221; said the FCC.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Democrats Donation could run afoul of federal law that prohibits taking money from foreign nationals  Democratic Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe \/ Getty Images &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-831829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=831829"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831829\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=831829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=831829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=831829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}