Labour MP Steve McCabe requested an inquiry last year after it was reported that a business Mr Schapps co-founded was selling ‘plagiarising’ software which helps firms boost profits by breaching Google’s rules.
The company, HowToCorp, was set up by Mr Shapps using an alias, Michael Green, and his wife Belinda, who now runs it.
Entrepreneur: A Labour MP asked for
an inquiry last year after it was reported that a business Grant Schapps
co-founded was selling 'plagiarising' software which helps firms boost
profits by breaching Google's rules
The firm sold TrafficPaymaster, a software package that increases advertising from the search engine by ‘spinning and scraping’ content from other websites.
Google automatically pays the owners of websites and blogs in return for hosting advertisements. TrafficPaymaster lets users take advantage of this, even though the sites they create may contain no original material.
Police have now told Mr McCabe the matter is closed.
But in an unusual move, the Met told him legal advice had ‘concluded that the selling of the software may constitute an offence of fraud, among others’.
HowToCorp, set up by Mr Shapps using the alias
Michael Green, sold TrafficPaymaster software, which increases
advertising payments from Google by 'scraping' content from
other websites to attract visitors
Labour’s shadow Cabinet Office minister, Jonathan Ashworth, said it was ‘an extraordinary revelation’ and said full explanations were required from the police and David Cameron.
Last night Tory sources said the mention of fraud in the letter was simply bad wording, adding: ‘The only thing Labour have succeeded with is wasting police time.’
Channel 4 News said it had been told by the police that they did not go ahead with the investigation because of the difficulty of getting evidence together.
Mr Shapps told the programme that the allegations had been a ‘political smear’ and ‘a politically motivated load of nonsense’.
No comments:
Post a Comment