‘Can I now send the funds?’: secrets of the Conservative money machine
Cucumber, potato and olive salad, cashew nut cream, nasturtium leaf pesto and potato ash, followed by red mullet with salsa verde, artichoke and heritage carrots, then a selection of pudding canapés. The accompanying white burgundy has citrus, grilled nuts and ripe apple on the nose, orchard fruits and wet pebbles on the palate, and a citrus-tinged finish.
The menu for the Winter Party is agreed. The chefs are at work. There are only hours left before the fundraising event of the year begins. It is 25 February 2020. Today, Mohamed Amersi will be where he has long wanted to be, seated among the highest in the land.
Born to a trading family in Kenya in 1960, three years before independence from Britain, Amersi attended Merchant Taylors’, a private school in Hertfordshire, before studying medicine and law at Sheffield University then at Cambridge. From there Amersi went from one prestigious law firm, Clifford Chance, to another, Jones Day (a “star” of its Swiss office, the trade press said), before becoming a dealmaker in the global telecoms industry. Short and smart, a neat greying plume above his hawkish features, on his charitable foundation’s website he is a “renowned global communications entrepreneur, philanthropist and thought leader”.
At 10.35am, an email goes round the Conservatives’ fundraising team with the subject line “Amersi”. The email reads: “Can we arrange for Amersi to get a table swing-by and name check from the PM? Initially Amersi wanted a shout out from stage but it’s too public and not fair on others. In short he is starting a Friends of the Middle East and North Africa which to be fair, would have some of the best group fundraising potential if done right. He wants someone to say this guy is behind a new and very promising concept – Friends of MENA”.
If ever there was a PM with the vim for a memorable table swing-by, it is Boris Johnson. He has been taking good care of himself lately. A holiday on Mustique, staying at a lovely villa arranged by one of tonight’s guests, the boss of Carphone Warehouse. And this past fortnight he’s been at Chevening, the grace-and-favour getaway in Kent. A well-earned rest, now he’s Got Brexit Done. Sure, he’s missed a few meetings of the Cobra security committee discussing this coronavirus thing. But other urgent matters must be attended to. There’s his second wife to divorce, and the pregnancy of his future third to announce. He’s dashed back to London for the fundraising bash.
All is arranged. Amersi prepares to receive Johnson’s favour. As Amersi himself has said, political donors are not philanthropists. They expect something in return.
* * *
Amersi’s entry to the Conservative fraternity starts in 2015, with an invitation to London’s most secretive club. “I am sure you will find it a most enjoyable and informative evening,” Ben Elliot tells Amersi in an email, before moving on to the suggested donation size.
Tall, handsome, his Eton accent customised to Mockney, Elliot can get you into places others cannot go. If you want the Sydney Harbour Bridge to yourself, Elliot’s people will get you the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and you can propose on it. They will have the doors to Shanghai’s couture boutiques closed to the public so that your wife is undisturbed while she shops on her birthday. For a fee of £15,000 a year or more, clients of Quintessentially, Elliot’s concierge service for the rich, party beside pyramids and dine on icebergs. If they want to stay at home, but wish their home was the Batcave, a Batcave Elliot’s people will build.
Elliot’s insertion of his Quintessentially client Amersi into royal circles is proceeding apace. In 2013, Elliot arranged for his Aunt Camilla’s husband, Charles – the heir to the British throne – to receive Amersi at Dumfries House, a royal Scottish retreat. With Amersi was Nadia Rodicheva, a Russian 17 years his junior.
The day after he returned to London after dining with Prince Charles, an email arrived for Amersi from Kenneth Dunsmuir of the trust that owns Dumfries House: “It was a real pleasure to meet both you and Nadia during your visit to Dumfries House at the weekend. I very much hope that you enjoyed your short stay with us and that your onward journey yesterday passed smoothly.” Documents were attached. They contained planned improvements to the estate that benefactors might wish to fund. One was an outdoor activity area.
Amersi emailed his banker at Coutts. There was plenty in his accounts: he’d just finished six years advising one of the world’s biggest communications corporations on making corporate deals, at a rate of £19,000 a day. Send £130,000 to Dumfries House, Amersi commanded. Elliot had achieved the win-win: Amersi, a Quintessentially client, had taken his place among the royals, and the royals – Elliot’s relatives – had gained the benefit of Amersi’s money. “Well done,” Elliot emailed Amersi. “Lots to discuss with you.”
Now begins the entrée to real power. Mohamed has banked millions from his career as a dealmaker in
emerging telecoms markets. His project now seems to be to fashion himself into a celebrated philanthropist, respected by the great and the good. The club to which Elliot has invited him, 5 Hertford Street, is only a five-minute walk across Mayfair from Amersi’s London townhouse. Beyond the doorman lies a place that is distinct from the one where stodgier Tories gather, the Carlton Club over in St James’s. At 5 Hertford Street, they’ve mixed in the new elite: celebrities such as George Clooney, Neymar, Lupita Nyong’o and Cara Delevingne, as well as young royals like Prince William, the heir to the heir to the throne. This is not to say that the future of the country is neglected by the punters at 5 Hertford Street. The instigators of Brexit gather here: Nigel Farage, Arron Banks, Michael Gove – the owner, Robin Birley, is a leave man, and glad to have them in.
It is Gove, a clever and gawky former journalist serving as David Cameron’s chief whip, to whom Amersi has the pleasure of listening during an intimate fundraiser in a 5 Hertford Street dining room in 2015. By the following year, the Brexiters have deposed Cameron. Theresa May succeeds him as prime minister. As she negotiates departure terms with the EU, May reads polls suggesting she could increase the Conservative majority in parliament. During a long walk in Wales, she resolves to call a snap election and crush Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour. The vote is set for 8 June 2017. For the campaign, her aides initially present her as an agent of change. Then they switch to calling her a “strong and stable” leader – one who calls a spade a spade, and Brexit Brexit. Then the strong and stable leader reverses the main policy in her manifesto.
The polls tighten. Even before this shambles, May has never been much of a fundraiser. Staggering from one mortification to the next, her campaign needs money.
With just weeks to go until polling day, Amersi offers to make his first political donation: £200,000. But there’s a hitch. He’s a non-dom – a tax status available to wealthy UK residents who say their main home is elsewhere and so pay fewer dues in Britain – and after all these years based in Dubai, Amersi’s not on the British electoral roll. And under the law, you have to be a registered voter to make a donation.
Amersi hastily applies to register as a voter, and on 28 April 2017 emails a Conservative party fundraiser, copying in Ben Elliot: “Can I now send the funds in my name or should Nadia do it?”
Rodicheva has been dazzling on Amersi’s arm as he tours the philanthropy circuit. London society has embraced her. There she was, just a few months ago in November 2016, posing for the cameras at the entrance to a fundraising fashion show just across Green Park from Buckingham Palace. Beside her, Amersi in a slick suit. Rodicheva has helped to put on the night. Jacques Azagury dresses the models, jewellery by Garrard. All sorts of names there: the designer Nicky Haslam, the personality Pinkietessa. It’s to raise funds for Camilla Parker Bowles’s osteoporosis charity. Rodicheva is a creative in her own right, of course, even if Amersi himself is the source of almost all the income at her interior design venture, English Story.
“I have just checked with compliance,” a Conservative functionary replies to Amersi’s question, “and you will not actually come on to the Electoral
Roll until 1st June, so we cannot accept a donation from you until then”. And therefore: “The donation must please come from Nadia’s account.”
Important, this: not being on the roll, Amersi is what you call an “impermissible donor”. Accepting a donation from an impermissible donor could violate electoral law. And yet the email to arrange the payment does not begin “Dear Nadia”. It begins: “Dear Mr Amersi. Thank you so much for the extremely generous donation of £200k from Nadia. Please find below our bank details for the transfer.”
And the bank receipt for the payment is sent not to Nadia Rodicheva, but to Mohamed Amersi. What’s more, if this receipt is supposed to be proof that the money was Nadia’s – as it must be under electoral law, given that it is her name the Conservatives declare as the donor – that’s not what it appears to show. The account is at Union Bancaire Privée (UBP) in Geneva, the bank that has taken over Coutts’ Swiss operation. There are no human beings named, just a string of numbers and letters that identifies the bank’s address. Last year, I emailed Amersi to ask him: “If there is evidence to demonstrate that this is Nadia’s account, please provide it.” He replied: “None of your business.”
(Amersi has since told the Guardian that he and Rodicheva have a “joint relationship” with UBP, and the reason the bank receipt was sent to him – and not Rodicheva – was because he requested it, so he could forward it to the Conservative party. His lawyers shared redacted UBP documents that indicated it was Rodicheva who made the transaction from her sole account, which only she could make transactions from. Amersi said it was the Conservative party that suggested Rodicheva should donate the funds – a practice, he said, previously followed by other donors – and insisted it undertook a “lengthy” process to ensure the donation was legally compliant. The Conservative party did not respond to questions about the donation but said it “only accepts donations from permissible sources”. Yet all this raises questions for the party. What steps did it take, exactly, to satisfy itself that the funds came from Rodicheva’s account? And did the party and Amersi arrange Rodicheva’s donation to get around the fact that he was an impermissible donor?)
In 2017, however, these questions seem less pressing to the Conservatives than the materialising prospect that it might be about to cease doing the thing it exists to do – rule. The treasurer, a mining mogul called Mick Davis, emails Amersi and Rodicheva on 30 May: “Thank you again for your recent extremely generous donation for the General Election Fighting Fund of £200,000. Your financial support has been exemplary. Your commitment is really very much appreciated, especially for this crucial election. I guess every party treasurer has claimed that their campaign is era defining, well I feel our one next week really is just that. The outcome of course will not just effect [sic] Brexit negotiations but determine whether Corbyn’s socialist agenda can be killed off for another generation. You will have seen that the polls have tightened and the fight is most definitely on.”
Even as he thanks Amersi and Rodicheva, the treasurer asks for more. Lynton Crosby, the Tories’ Australian election guru, has a shopping list for the final week: £500,000 for Facebook videos, more for ads that wrap over the
front pages of newspapers. Davis asks: could you manage another £15,000? “We are in Madagascar and slightly out of touch with events,” Amersi replies 20 minutes later. “It’s a pity about the tightening but at least complacency will not set in. We are happy to contribute a further £15,000.” Once more, the name entered on the donor registry is Rodicheva’s.
* * *
The Conservatives retain power. But they lose their majority. For a while, May clings on in Downing Street. She is still prime minister in 2018 when a new star on the Conservative scene, Mohamed Amersi, hosts the annual party fundraiser, the Carlton Club Dinner (this year held, conveniently for Amersi, at the Dorchester Hotel, round the back of his Mayfair townhouse). By now Amersi is on the electoral roll and able to donate in his own increasingly illustrious name. Just as he opted for “global elite” membership of Ben Elliot’s Quintessentially service, Amersi purchases membership of the Conservatives’ Leader’s Group. Fifty grand a year are the dues. That buys you monthly lunches with ministers.
Amersi and his chequebook attend the party’s 2019 Black and White Ball in Battersea. Lots of police are there to protect this elite gathering. Theresa May zooms in from Brexit negotiations in Northern Ireland to be present when an evening with her at the Proms is auctioned for the price of a mediumsized house. You can pay to go to Michael Gove’s home and have a meal cooked for you. Or for a cheese-tasting session with Liz Truss, then a minor minister known only for a speech in which she denounced the “disgrace” of Britain importing most of its cheese. Amersi parts with £50,000 for two lots: dinner with the foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, and a magic lesson, to be taught by international development secretary and former illusionist’s assistant Penny Mordaunt.
Eventually, the Conservatives’ Brexit frenzy consumes May and she tearfully announces her resignation in May 2019. Amersi spreads his largesse among the candidates: £10,000 apiece for Gove, Hunt and the Brexiters’ champion, Boris Johnson. In a moment of confusion and foreboding, Johnson triumphs. So breakfast with him is the most desirable lot at the next Carlton Club Dinner in 2019. Amersi wins the bidding with £100,000.
Johnson says only he can Get Brexit Done. He calls a new election and, in December 2019, regains the majority May lost. On average, £200,000 of campaign spending secures victory in one constituency. By that measure, the £500,000 Amersi has given since the last election would get you two-and-ahalf seats. Not bad when the Conservative gain of 48 has given Johnson a commanding hold on power. Now, in February 2020, it’s on to the Winter Party (renamed this year – “Black and White Ball” is not a great look during a culture war). A time to reward friends.
Amersi emails the outreach team at Conservative headquarters the day before the Winter Party, regarding his plans for Comena, the Conservative Friends of the Middle East and North Africa. “From my side I have spoken to many Mid-East Ambassadors about this and they are hugely supportive. Indeed some of them will be on my table on Tuesday.” He has also discussed his plan with the man Johnson has appointed as new party cochair, Ben Elliot. Johnson’s fellow Old Etonian, this maestro of favour-trading is now in charge of party moneymaking. Johnson’s majority of 80, the majority that slammed Brexit through – the Conservatives won it after record fundraising. Elliot has ramped up the Quintessentially model: pay your fees, join the club. Donate £250,000 and you get membership of the secret “advisory board”, pretty much unlimited access to anyone from Johnson down. “Ben has opened every chequebook across Mayfair,” a Tory source purrs in the press. “Boris acknowledges the important role he is playing.”
As well as Elliot, Amersi says he has discussed Comena with the member of the government who will host Amersi’s table: James Cleverly, the minister in the Foreign Office for the Middle East and North Africa. “They both expressed huge support!” Amersi said in his email to Conservative headquarters.
Amersi has placed Rodicheva to his left. To his right, Cleverly. Then, the ambassadors of the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Lebanon and Iraq. Envoys from the region so pivotal to British interests: supplier of oil, buyer of arms, gatherer of counter-terrorism intelligence.
The auction lots at the Winter Party are delectable. Whisky-tasting with Truss. Lunch with Zac Goldsmith. Dinner in Mayfair with Michael Gove, or at the Carlton Club with the health secretary, Matt Hancock, who is in the meantime supposedly getting to grips with this new virus. Eighty grand gets you into a box at Lord’s to watch cricket with the chancellor, Rishi Sunak. A game of tennis with Boris goes for £45,000.
And now Johnson draws near. He’s working the room. At Amersi’s table he shakes hands with the ambassadors. Then, in full view of the diplomatic corps, not to mention a cabinet member and whoever else in this estimable gathering may be watching, the prime minister singles out Amersi for a compliment.
The boy from Mombasa is where he feels he belongs. Here, in the elite. To get Comena going, there’s now just the formality of letting Charlotte Leslie, the ex-MP who’s doing Middle East stuff for Conservatives, know about Amersi’s vision. Once named backbencher of the year, she lost her seat in May’s 2017 snap election, and since then has run the Conservative Middle East Council, which has taken delegations of MPs to the region since 1980. A week after the Winter Party, a senior official at Conservative headquarters sends an email introducing Amersi to Leslie.
Amersi has breezed through the party’s vetting. Conservative officials email each other to say Amersi is what he says he is: “a well-connected worldwide man”. But Leslie does some Googling. She learns that Amersi has some Russia in his past. There’s a Forbes article from 2006 that mentions “a mysterious figure named Mohamed Amersi” doing telecoms deals in St Petersburg. Vladimir Putin’s minister of communications, Leonid Reiman, is quoted dismissing allegations that he, Reiman, is the secret beneficiary. Leslie reads that, from 2008 to 2013, Amersi was a senior adviser to TeliaSonera Group, a Scandinavian telecoms giant, and was involved in its controversial dealings in Nepal. Over Christmas, Leslie gathers what more she can find on Amersi into a memo. What really worries her is the gap between what she seems to be discovering about Amersi and his public image.
Around the end of 2020, Leslie sends her memo to some MPs, some diplomats, some intelligence people, and party elders – one of whom forwards it to the co-chair, Ben Elliot.
* * *
Months after Leslie’s memos raise questions about the sources of Amersi’s wealth, senior Tory officials are emailing staff at No 10 about the breakfast with Johnson that Amersi is still owed. “Can you do quite an in depth look into this?” writes one. “He’s a massive donor, just want to know if it’s likely to blow up into something if we do a breakfast.”
The Conservative Research Department does a check. “Nothing bad came back,” the senior party official assures the prime minister’s aide. Let’s get that breakfast sorted. Some swish hotel near Downing Street.
But before it can happen, news of Amersi’s fight with Leslie comes out. Amersi got hold of one of her memos. He repeatedly asked Elliot to get his Middle East role approved all the same. In one WhatsApp message, on 8 January 2021, Amersi said: “Shall we have a quick chat now or is that pushing you … if you want me to drop this, please say so to me! I am at least owed that! Friendships usually outlast positions in my humble experience … I know you hate confrontation. I hate it too! I didn’t start this mess. Charlotte Leslie did!”
“!!!. I am being bombarded,” Elliot replied. “I do not mind confrontation. Have a meeting with team next week on all this.”
“You take everyone’s call but mine!” Amersi wrote the same day. “Somebody who by Charlotte’s own admission has given the party £750k!” The figure includes the money that was declared as a donation from Rodicheva while Amersi was an impermissible donor. But this is not the topic to which the co-chair is addressing his energies.
“I know what to do. Do not need to be instructed,” Elliot wrote.
Amersi hires Nigel Tait, most formidable of the partners at the reputation-management law firm CarterRuck. Tait once remarked that he gets a buzz from suppressing free speech. Letter after letter after letter are sent to reporters and editors threatening legal proceedings of scarcely imaginable expense. That usually does the trick – the book, the article, the documentary will vanish from view. Should these muckrakers, these tittle-tattle merchants, these grubby hacks defy his clients, Tait will ensure that they spend months, years, in court. Funding this is no problem: his clients tend to possess inexhaustible quantities of money.
Tait writes to Leslie, saying she has spread toxic lies. She is, he says, conducting a campaign to do irreparable damage to Amersi’s reputation. Tait wants to know – pronto – how she intends to declare in public that she won’t stand in Amersi’s way. How she intends to help Amersi’s Middle East ambitions come to fruition.
If she refuses, Leslie could lose everything. Her job, her flat. She could be disgraced. “How dare she insult me?” Amersi once asked of Leslie. But she is defiant. She remembers her surfing days. They used to say that when the wave looks too big, too full of power, that’s when you must paddle towards it. Towards your fear.
When this fight between a party donor and a former Tory MP becomes public in mid-2021, Amersi says in an interview: “I would expect somebody senior from the party to at least have the decency to phone and say, ‘Look, Mohamed, I’m sorry that you’re having
to face all of this. We stand behind you.’ They’d release a statement: ‘Mohamed Amersi is one of our loyal supporters. We have huge respect for him, and for all that he has done, not only for this party, but for so many academic institutions, charities.’” But Conservative headquarters is silent. After all those donations. After all those fees to Ben’s firm as an elite Quintessentially client – £15,000 year after year after year. Not a word of public support for this selfless thought leader.
In January 2022, David Davis, the veteran Conservative MP, uses a speech in the Commons to describe what he calls “an industry that hides evil in plain sight”. “There are those,” he says, “with exceptionally deep pockets and exceptionally questionable ethics [who] use our justice system to threaten, intimidate and put the fear of God into British journalists, citizens, officials and media organisations. What results is injustice, intimidation, suppression of free speech, the crushing of a free press, bullying and bankruptcy. It results in protection from investigation and gives encouragement to fraudsters, crooks and money launderers. It has turned London into the global capital of dirty money. In extreme cases, it can undermine the security of the state by allowing people to act as extensions of foreign powers.”
He describes a few cases. One involves a donor to his own party. “Amersi,” Davis tells the Commons, “has used his wealth and influence to try to bully [Charlotte] Leslie into silence.” Amersi writes to the speaker to complain, but no action is taken against Davis.
Even after Davis’s speech, the Conservative cause continues to profit from Amersi’s beneficence. The party has to refund £200,000 for the Johnson breakfast, Hunt sushi, and Mordaunt magic that never took place, and a year’s Leader’s Group subs. But at a lunchtime auction held by a Conservative organisation in May 2022, Amersi gives another £16,000 for the Thatcher Package (commemorative plate, autographed bottle of whisky, tea with two of the late Margaret’s colleagues) and dinner at a Green Park mansion with “four guests from the Westminster political scene”.
Labour calls on Johnson to sack his co-chair for the conflicts of interest between his political and commercial roles that the Amersi affair has exposed. The prime minister declines. A spokesperson for the party says that Elliot’s role at the party is “entirely separate from his other interests”. When Johnson himself goes, felled by one lie too many in a career of fabrication, Elliot (soon to be knighted in Johnson’s resignation honours) goes, too. He stands behind his old friend outside the door to No 10 as Boris gives a valedictory speech quoting a Roman dictator.
“Ben Elliott’s [sic] resignation as @Conservatives co-chair was long overdue,” tweets Amersi, whose fondness for Elliot evaporated when he didn’t get him what he wanted. The cleanup of Conservative headquarters that he has long advocated has begun. “But the rot doesn’t stop there. It goes deeper!” he added. Plus a prophecy: “Only when the cleanup is complete, the process of governing and delivery can begin. And this will be rewarded by more money, cleaner money!”
Amersi pursues Charlotte Leslie through the courts for three years until the court of appeal finally dismisses his defamation claim in 2023. Others receive threatening legal letters, too. And Amersi is suing the BBC, over a Panorama documentary examining his role – minimal and unwitting, he says – in a TeliaSonera telecoms deal that the company later admitted involved bribing an Uzbek dictator’s daughter. Carter-Ruck’s writ says: “The Claimant has an established reputation as an anti-corruption campaigner,” which the BBC has “seriously undermined and damaged”.
As for the Conservatives, it looks like their power is draining away. The polls suggest Labour will win the coming election. Should Labour candidates be in need of some help with campaign costs, a new source of funds has recently become available. In late 2023, Mohamed Amersi announced he would be happy to donate.
Adapted from Cuckooland: Where the Rich Own the Truth by Tom Burgis, published by HarperCollins on 29 February andavailable at guardianbookshop.co.uk
• Follow the Long Read on X at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here.