Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
FILTHY LUCRE
PM has questions to answer as leaked documents reveal Tory donors’ ‘fraud & bribes’
TWO major Tory party donors have been linked to allegedly corrupt offshore payments in a huge cache of leaked documents.
Lawyer Mohamed Amersi was involved in the payment of an alleged £160million bribe to an offshore company owned by the daughter of a former President of Uzbekistan’s.
The payment was described as a bribe by the US Department for Justice as part of their investigation into Swedish telecoms firm Telia, which saw it fined $965m (£700m).
Amersi worked as a consultant for Telia and was paid $500,000 for facilitating the deal, according to the leaked Pandora Papers, but denies any wrongdoing.
He has given £525,000 to the Tories since 2018.
His lawyers said the offshore company in Gibraltar had been “vetted and approved by Telia” and that its involvement “did not raise any red flags” to him.
There have been calls for the Conservative Party to return donations from individuals accused of links to corruption. But Prime Minister Boris Johnson said: “All I can say is that all these donations are vetted in the normal way.”
A second donor, Russian oil boss Victor Fedotov, made more than £100m from an allegedly corrupt Russian pipeline deal with Transneft, the state-owned oil and gas pipeline company, according to the files.
Mr Fedotov is named as a secret owner – along with two Transneft executives – of a company that received $146m for work it had not carried out, a 2008 audit revealed.
Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny was leaked the report and estimated $4bn had been embezzled from Transneft but no charges were brought. Mr Fedotov’s lawyers say “there is no evidence whatsoever” he behaved improperly.
His firms have given £700,000 to 34 Conservative MPS and their local parties and in days the Government will decide on a plan by his firm Aquind for a controversial energy link between the UK and France.
Lawyers stressed Fedotov did not personally donate to the Tories and he was not involved in the management of the UK company and had no influence over its donations.
The leak of 12 million files to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reveals the secret offshore wealth of more than 300 of the rich and famous. The papers also show Tony and Cherie Blair legally saved £312,000 in stamp duty when they bought an office in London through an offshore firm.
Mrs Blair said there was “nothing unusual or underhand in any of this” and she did not know the identity of the sellers before the transaction.