Imagine this: a fundamentalist religious sect that believes women to be subservient, hates gay people, and tells its followers not to vote is funding mainstream political campaigns across the world, using front companies and secret deals.

Far-fetched as it sounds, voters in New Zealand are the latest to live this. The scandal has already contributed to the resignation of two senior opposition MPs and threatens to go deeper - on 23 November, the National Party leader, Don Brash, resigned after a book was published alleging his party had accepted secret donations from the Exclusive Brethren, a fundamentalist Christian sect.

The book, The Hollow Men, details how the National Party - which narrowly lost last year's general election - formed secret alliances with right-wing groups. Among these allies were the Brethren, who orchestrated a million-dollar campaign attacking left-wing parties and urging voters to take a morally conservative line.

What's more, members of the Brethren reportedly hired detectives to dig up dirt on the private lives of government ministers, including Helen Clark, the Labour prime minister.

Brash denies that the revelations have anything to do with his resignation, and cites "damaging" speculation, but Prime Minister Clark told the New Statesman that the National Party was guilty of "cynical manipulation of a breathtaking kind", arguing that the Brethren were working "unashamedly" for a change of government in New Zealand.

The movement, which grew out of the British-based evangelical sect known as the Plymouth Brethren, numbers only about 40,000 members in total. But its members include wealthy businessmen who have contributed to right-wing campaigns around the world. And yet, though happy to exercise such influence, the sect's leaders advise members not to vote or take part in the democratic process.

Conservatives in the United States and Canada have rallied such groups to their cause by focusing on the issue of gay marriage. In Australia the prime minister, John Howard, has already faced questions over his party's links to the Exclusive Brethren, which campaigned against left-wing candidates in recent state elections. There is also a British connection. Before this year's general election in Sweden, the Brethren spent millions of kronor campaigning for the centre-right coalition that ended ten years of social-democratic government. Leaflets were distributed attacking the ruling alliance, funded by an unheard-of company called Nordas Sverige. When journalists from Aftonbladet newspaper investigated, they discovered the company wasn't registered in Sweden: Nordas was traced to an industrial estate in Liverpool, and a local businessman called Maxwell Kevin Haughton. He admitted that he was a member of the Brethren and that his associates had been campaigning in Sweden, but declined to comment further. There is no evidence yet that the Brethren campaign in Britain.

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