Women and money – the common links in a controversial career

TODAY’S revelations about 81year-old Geoffrey Robinson combine two of the recurring themes of his long and controversial political career: opaque financial dealings and female friendships.

In 1997, as Mr Robinson was busy maximising his links with Tony Blair’s new Government, he inherited more than £12million from his close friend, Joska Bourgeois, who at one time had been the world’s 12th richest woman.

Shortly afterwards, The Mail on Sunday revealed that Mr Robinson and Italian film star Annabella Incontrera had been lovers since 1973, when he was managing director of British Leyland’s Italian arm, Innocenti.

To the fury of Mr Robinson’s wife, Maltese opera singer Maria Elena Giorgio – with whom he has two children, and who has stuck by him through every controversy – Ms Incontrera declared: ‘Geoffrey was a very good lover and very persistent in his proposals of marriage.’ The actual Mrs Robinson, whom he married in 1967, said of the affair: ‘So many times it was supposed to have been called off and then I discovered that it’s not called off at all.’

Mr Robinson, who became the MP for Coventry North West in 1976, used the estimated £30million he made from business deals, including many linked to the crooked Czech-born media tycoon Robert Maxwell, to help secure access to the inner sanctum of the Labour Government. Mr Blair would take free holidays at Mr Robinson’s Tuscan villa, with its 50ft outdoor pool and landscaped gardens dotted with cypress trees.

Mr Robinson has also owned Orchards, a mansion set in 50 acres of Surrey countryside near Godalming, along with properties in the South of France and a Park Lane penthouse.

In 1996, he bought the Left-wing New Statesman magazine –selling it 12 years later when Mr Blair left Downing Street – and set the clock ticking on another scandal when he lent £373,000 to Peter Mandelson to help him buy a townhouse in Notting Hill. When the deal was exposed, it triggered Mr Mandelson’s first Cabinet resignation and forced Mr Robinson to quit his as Paymaster General.

Mr Robinson, whose business career took off in 1973 when he became chief executive of Jaguar at the age of 34, first formed his relationship with Maxwell in 1986 when he founded a technology concern, by merging one of his companies with one of Maxwell’s. TransTec went on to become a £200 million conglomerate.

He faced a series of inquiries by MPs over the dealings. In 1998 it emerged that he had received £150,000 as a director of Central & Sherwood – TransTec’s old name – which never appeared in the register of MPs’ interests.

Shortly afterwards it was revealed that he had received a payment of £1million from Maxwell just months before the collapse of his business empire. In October 2001, he was suspended for three weeks as an MP for failing to properly declare a 1990 £200,000 invoice to Maxwell.

And earlier this year The Mail on Sunday revealed Czech spy files that alleged that Mr Robinson was a ‘productive source’ who provided at least 81 pieces of intelligence over three years at the height of the Cold War. He strenuously denies the allegations.