Billionaire and Lord Ashcroft named as victims of offshore hack
Hayley Dixon, Luke Heighton
Callum Adams
ONE of the Conservative Party’s biggest donors and a billionaire hedge fund manager who played a key role in the Brexit campaign are both braced for revelations about their financial affairs, The Sunday Telegraph can disclose, as a second company is revealed as a victim of an offshore hack.
Lord Ashcroft, who has given millions to the Tories, could see his financial deals exposed as he is a client of a company that has been caught up in a huge data leak.
The dealings of Robert Mercer, a major donor to Donald Trump who also aided the Leave.EU campaign, could also come under scrutiny following the attack on one of the world’s biggest offshore law firms.
The men are the first to be named in connection with the hack on Appleby, first disclosed by The Telegraph last week, files from which are expected to be published by an international group of Left-leaning publications today.
The news that Lord Ashcroft could be among those named will be potentially embarrassing to the Conservative Party because of sensitivities surrounding legitimate offshore tax avoidance schemes.
The leak comes a year after the “Panama Papers” exposed the hidden millions of politicians, celebrities and some of the world’s richest businessmen.
Lord Ashcroft – a former deputy chairman and party treasurer – has been a major donor to the Conservatives and, after a brief hiatus prompted by a falling out with David Cameron, gave £500,000 to the party in the runup to this year’s general election.
Waterloo Investment Holdings Ltd, of which Lord Ashcroft is the principal shareholder, is sponsored to list on the Bermuda Stock Exchange by Estera, an offshoot company of Appleby.
Estera became independent in January 2016 but continued to use the IT services of its former parent company and it is understood that when Apple- by’s servers in Bermuda were hacked some of Estera’s client details were also breached. It informed the regulators in Bermuda and its clients immediately, a source close to the company said.
Although it is legitimate to hold offshore accounts, because of the furore over David Cameron’s father holding overseas trusts – exposed as part of the Panama Papers – the Conservative Party is likely to be sensitive about any links it has to individuals with accounts in Bermuda.
Mr Mercer’s company, Cambridge Analytica, oversees at least five multimillion-dollar investment vehicles legally registered in Bermuda by Appleby.
The total value of the funds is believed to be in excess of $2.7billion, ac- cording to US Securities and Exchange Commission documents.
The prominent Republican Party supporter announced on Thursday that he was stepping down as the co-chief executive of Renaissance Technologies after being accused of fuelling the rise of the alt-Right. He also announced he was selling his stake in the Right-wing website Breitbart to his daughters. A spokesman for Renaissance Technologies declined to comment.
A spokesman for Lord Ashcroft said that “to the best of everyone’s knowledge” Waterloo Investment Holding Ltd had not been impacted by the hack.
He said that much of the company data was already public and there was “little concern about Waterloo and its shareholders”.
Appleby and Estera have both denied any wrongdoing on behalf of their companies and their clients and both said they were committed to protecting their clients’ data. ble and true”. But after two years and more than £2.5million, the Met apologised, as it emerged the claims were allegedly false and malicious.
Now a year after a report found the Met had made 43 failings during the inquiry, Lord Hogan-Howe is to be investigated by the London Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime. It will focus on comments he made on LBC radio, in September 2015, in which he insisted he had not approved the phrase “credible and true” and it had actually been a slip of the tongue by a senior detective.
During the interview, Lord HoganHowe said: “As you know one of our superintendents, in making a quick recourse in an interview, said the words ‘credible and true’. What we have said in a statement, which people might have seen … is that he was credible at the beginning and we had to corroborate what he said. We said that if the use of the word ‘true’, if it left the understanding – the belief – that we were closed-minded about the outcome, that was wrong.”
Harvey Proctor, a former Tory MP who was one of those falsely accused, has always insisted Lord Hogan-Howe had approved use of the phrase.
Lord Hogan-Howe could not reached for comment. be