THE suspended CEO of Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy at the centre of a scandal over the use of Facebook data, has cancelled an appearance before British MPs, the chairman of a parliamentary committee says.

Alexander Nix had been due to testify on Wednesday.

“His legal representation has said that he’s now not able to give evidence to the committee tomorrow, as a consequence of him having been served an information notice, and being subject to a criminal investigation by the Information Commissioner’s Office,” Damian Collins, chair of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, said at a session of the committee. “We do not accept Mr Nix’s reason for not appearing in a public session before the Committee,” he added in an emailed statement.

“There is therefore no legal reason why Mr Nix cannot appear.”

Mr Collins said he was considering a formal summons for Mr Nix, and he hoped to provide an update on a date for a new hearing early next week.

Cambridge Analytica was created by wealthy Republican donor Robert Mercer and was previously run by Steve Bannon, who went on to become White House chief strategist. The data company received $5.9 million from Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

The firm had its London office searched by British law enforcement officers last month.

A UK court granted the search warrant in March to search Cambridge Analytica after news reports that the company used data acquired from 87 million Americans’ Facebook profiles for political messaging campaigns. The investigation is part of a broader look at whether personal data was taken improperly.

Despite Mr Nix not appearing, former Cambridge Analytica employee Brittany Kaiser did give testimony.

She said there was a range of personality quizzes designed to acquire personal data, such as Aleksander Kogan’s This is Your Digital Life app.

“The Kogan/GSR datasets and questionnaires were not the only Facebook-connected questionnaires and datasets which Cambridge Analytica used,” Ms Kaiser told the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee.

“I am aware in a general sense of a wide range of surveys which were done by CA or its partners, usually with a Facebook login — for example, the ‘sex compass’ quiz,” she said.

“I do not know the specifics of these surveys or how the data was acquired or processed.

“But I believe it is almost certain that the number of Facebook users whose data was compromised through routes similar to that used by Kogan is much greater than 87 million; and that both Cambridge Analytica and other unconnected companies and campaigns were involved in these activities,” she revealed.

Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faced two days of intense questioning about the data leak to Cambridge Analytica.