A Luxembourg-based businessman who chaired the Lotus Formula One team and was linked to a takeover of a French football club has given the Conservative party £400,000, raising concerns about the party’s plans to crack down on offshore funds.
Gerard Lopez, who co-founded Genii Capital, which owned Lotus before Renault’s takeover, gave the Conservatives the large donation shortly before the EU referendum. Genii’s website says he is based in Luxembourg but he can donate to a UK political party if he is on the electoral register.
Lopez’s companies appear extensively in the Panama Papers, the huge leak of information from the Panama law firm Mossack Fonseca, which show the host of ways in which the rich can exploit secretive offshore tax regimes.
The donation emerged in the latest disclosure from the Electoral Commission that also showed that the Labour peer Lord Sainsbury gave over £2m to both the Labour party and the Liberal Democrats in the run up to the referendum – prompting the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, to query why he was allowed to financially support both parties when other Labour party members had been expelled.
The Panama Papers reveal that Lopez was granted “power of attorney” over a British Virgin Islands company called Gravity Sport Management Limited, which meant he would have been able to control it. Gravity Sport handled the careers of Formula One drivers including Romain Grosjean until it was put into administration last year.
Lopez’s donation emerged as the Electoral Commission published information about funding to political parties in April, May and June of this year. The donation is likely to raise questions about the Conservatives’ plans to crack down on the use of offshore investment vehicles. Jonathan Ashworth, the Labour MP for Leicester South, said: “This raises serious questions for Theresa May’s government, when they continue to tolerate tax avoidance by the wealthy and fail to address serious concerns among the public about tax havens. It’s ordinary people and public services that pay the cost.”
According to the Electoral Commission’s disclosure, the Labour party received £6,186,695 during the second quarter of 2016, while the Conservatives were given £4,321,937.
Ukip received £1,252,891 in the months leading up to the Europe referendum in June, with Ko Barclay, the stepson of the Telegraph’s co-owner Sir Frederick Barclay, giving Ukip £100,000.
Apart from Lord Sainsbury’s donation, the second largest donation from an individual to Labour was £200,000 from Max Mosley, the former Formula One boss. Mosley became a privacy campaigner after the now defunct News of the World published a story about his sex life in 2008.
Almost all the other donations to Labour came from unions including £816,559 from Unite and £604,411 from Unison.
Other political donors include £262,500 to the Conservatives from the mining tycoon Mick Davis. Alexander Fraser, the Conservative party treasurer who was awarded a peerage in David Cameron’s honours list in July, gave the Conservatives £261,900 in June.
Lopez, who speaks seven languages and was an early investor in Skype, has business interests around the world. He is the co-founder of Mangrove Capital Partners and the chairman of a brokerage firm called Nekton, which focuses on Latin America and Africa.
A spokesperson for Lopez said: “Mr Lopez has invested significant amounts in the UK, creating local jobs and generating tax revenues. Mr Lopez pays the full amount of tax owed as per his legal obligations.”
Lopez has previously spoken about chairing the Lotus Formula One team, saying it was “an embassy on wheels”. “It’s extraordinary what owning an F1 team does for networking,” he told the Independent. “Everybody who is anybody wants to be invited into the paddocks. You can’t quantify the value of this network.”
The Panama Papers are records which were obtained from an anonymous source by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, which shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and the Guardian. There is no suggestion that Lopez has done anything wrong.
They caused serious political embarrassment for David Cameron in the last weeks of his premiership, after it emerged that he benefited from a Panama-based offshore trust set up by his late father.
