Labour has called on the Tories to return cash from a major party donor after leaked documents exposed the secret financial dealings of some of the world’s richest and most powerful people.
The leak shows Mohamed Amersi, who helped funded Boris Johnson’s campaign to become Prime Minister, advised on a deal that was later found to be a £162 million bribe for the daughter of the then president of Uzbekistan.
Anneliese Dodds MP, Labour’s party chair, said: “It’s really concerning that the Conservatives have accepted hundreds of thousands of pounds from a man who appears to be closely linked to one of Europe’s biggest corruption scandals.”
“This is not the first time that Mohamed Amersi has been embroiled in controversy. The Conservatives should return the money he donated to them and come clean about who else is getting exclusive access to the prime minister and the chancellor in return for cash.”
"There can’t be one rule for senior Conservatives and their chums and another rule for everyone else.”
Boris Johnson said all Conservative Party donations are “vetted”.
The Prime Minister told reporters in Manchester: “All I can say on that one is all these donations are vetted in the normal way in accordance with rules that were set up under a Labour government. So, we vet them the whole time.”
Chancellor Rishi Sunak has said the HMRC will inspect the leaked Pandora papers exposing the secret financial dealings of some of the world’s richest and most powerful people.
Asked if he has ever benefited from an offshore arrangement, he told Sky News: “No. I haven’t.
“I’ve seen these things overnight as well and it’s always tough for me to comment on them specifically given they’ve only just emerged, and of course HMRC will look through those to see if there’s anything we can learn.”
Amersi’s lawyers said any suggestion he “knowingly” facilitated corrupt payments was false and that the underlying arrangements for the deal had been put in place two years before.
They added that Amersi had relied on the fact that others had done due diligence on the arrangement, that he had “no reason” to believe it might be a bribe, and that he had only worked on the project for six weeks.
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