The Guardian: Tory links to Russia and Saudis run deep. So where’s the media outrage?

Before we get out the bunting, though, let’s look at one donation as an example. It was 2014, and Lubov Chernukhin, the wife of Russia’s former deputy finance minister, paid the princely sum of £160,000 to play tennis with David Cameron and Boris Johnson. In total, since 2012 – when the Electoral Commission initially declared her an “impermissible donor”, before subsequently allowing her to donate – she has handed the Tories £514,000.

I put it to you gently that if Labour took half a million pounds from the wife of a former Cuban minister, there would be no debate about whether this represented a scandalous financial relationship with the Cuban regime. Other examples include £400,000 from Gérard Lopez, a businessmen on the board of a company that partnered with Russian banks that had sanctions imposed on them during the Ukraine crisis. [...]

In 2011, for example, the Financial Times reported that “even donors admit that Tory MPs’ desire to cut the 50p top rate of income tax is because these rich City donors are so close to the party”. This same City of London is awash with dodgy money from Russia. No wonder, then, that in 2014 a secret government document revealed plans to stop any sanctions against Russia that might damage the City. Labour has attempted to introduce legislation that could prevent certain Russian individuals entering Britain or block their assets: how mysterious, then, that the Tories blocked it for “technical reasons”. [...]

And then there is the Tories’ financial heart. The Qatari dictatorship owns three times more property in London than the Queen, and more than the mayoralty. Indeed, the Qatar Investment Authority owns Canary Wharf, the Shard and Harrods. Let’s be clear: the Qatari regime has backed extremist and terrorist organisations, as have wealthy individuals under its jurisdiction. As Paddy Ashdown put it in 2015, David Cameron failed to put sufficient pressure on Qatar and Saudi Arabia to stop funding extremism, leading Ashdown to “worry about the closeness between the Conservative party and rich Arab Gulf individuals”. Consider Theresa May’s refusal to publish a report on foreign funding of extremism. Well, it would hardly go down well with the Gulf states, which are so deeply embedded in Tory milieus, would it?

read the article