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LONDON - The man at the centre of Britain's political donations storm hit out Sunday as Prime Minister Gordon Brown's beleaguered administration tried to shift the debate onto party funding.
David Abrahams, who gave more than 670,000 pounds (1.38 million dollars, 940,000 euros) to Brown's governing Labour Party through four proxies to conceal his identity -- unwittingly in breach of funding rules -- claimed the arrangement was far more widely known about than Labour figures have admitted.
Meanwhile Labour Cabinet members Hazel Blears and James Purnell hit the television studios to advocate the case for reforming funding rules -- though the opposition blasted the move as an attempt to dodge the issue.
The scandal has provoked the resignation of Labour's general secretary, ongoing revelations of who knew what and when and, most recently, a police investigation.
In an article for The Independent on Sunday newspaper, Abrahams said he wanted to get the facts straight.
"At no time was I told that I was doing anything wrong," he wrote.
"Party officials knew of my wish to retain my privacy and were only too happy to accept my money via intermediaries. If not, they would have returned it sooner.
"Since 2003 I understand that I have donated more than 670,000 pounds to the Labour Party" in 19 separate donations, he said.
"Remaining anonymous was a condition of my giving, and the relevant party officials knew that.
"Only a very few officials and party figures in higher echelons of the national party structure were aware."
He said that during a dinner on April 25 he was placed next to Jon Mendelsohn, Brown's chief election fundraiser.
"I told him that I regularly donated to the party, and I described how it was done through intermediaries for the purposes of anonymity, to which he replied, 'That sounds like a good idea'."
A spokesman for Abrahams told The Sunday Times newspaper: "Ten people in the Labour Party knew of the manner in which Mr Abrahams made the donations."
Mendelsohn insists he only became aware of the disguised donations arrangement in September and wanted to stop it.
In response to Abrahams' outburst, he said: "This latest statement is fictional and completely untrue. I will be co-operating fully with the police in their investigation."
David Cameron, leader of the main opposition Conservatives, slammed Labour's attempts to link the scandal to a wider issue of party funding reform.
"This is a simple matter of law-breaking," he told BBC television.
Brown was "caught waving a gun around and now is saying 'yes, it's terrible, we really must do something about gun control'.
"He's trying to spin his way out of a scandal... If you think spin died with Tony Blair, forget about it. This lot are, I would say, actually worse.
A new ICM poll in the News of the World newspaper put the Conservatives on 41 percent, Labour on 30 percent and the Liberal Democrats on 19 percent.
Labour had been up to 11 points ahead after Brown replaced Blair as party leader and prime minister in June.
The affair has revived memories of a previous party funding investigation, which dogged the last year of Blair's premiership and saw him become the first serving prime minister to be questioned by police.
The new donor row threatens to make Brown the second and has scuppered his pledge to bring a new transparency to British politics.
- AFP /ls
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