There is a weird mystery surrounding the gold nuggets paid to UKIP's Douglas Carswell
Last month, Jag Singh, the co-founder of political blogging website MessageSpace, claimed Carswell requested to be paid in gold nuggets by any advertisers who wished to place ads on his blog, Business Insider noted.
"The quirk about Douglas [Carswell] is that because he is such a fiscally responsible person, he wants payment in gold," Singh said in an interview with Campaign. "Every month instead of sending him a wire transfer, we are sending him a gold nugget."
It wasn't totally clear whether Singh's claim was sincere or a tongue-in-cheek remark. So we did some digging.
The MP for Clacton appeared to confirm the notion in an interview with Total Politics last month. "I think he [Singh] initially offered to pay me with a laptop or something," he said. "I said actually when the equivalent amount of money to a half gold sovereign has been reached, why don't you given me a half gold sovereign."
"It was more for comic entertainment value, but I do recall I've been given a half gold sovereign by MessageSpace."
Business Insider emailed Paul Staines, the other co-founder of MessageSpace, to ask if Carswell really was being paid in gold. Staines, who is best-known for running the Guido Fawkes website, didn't deny the claim. He simply told us "other payment methods are available," but declined to elaborate.
We left multiple messages for Singh but received no response.
Carswell, like all British MPs, is required to record the non-parliamentary payments he receives in the official register of interests. But there appear to be no records of MessageSpace payments to Carswell in the register.
Parliamentary rules state all individual payments worth more than £100, or payments worth less than £100 from the same source which total over £300 in a calendar year, must be declared in the register. Payments are defined as "salaries, fees and payments in kind; gifts received in recognition of services."
Neither Singh nor Staines disclosed how much the nuggets they allegedly paid to Carswell "every month" weighed.
A gram of gold was worth approximately £35 at the time of writing. This means Carswell would be required to declare the gold if one individual nugget weighed around three grams or more, or if all the nuggets he received in a calendar year weighed around nine grams or more in total.
Business Insider has emailed the UKIP MP and phoned his office on multiple occasions. He is yet to respond. We will update this story when the truth about the Carswell gold emerges.
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