Tory Donors

From Private Eye 1258/9

££££  ALL A BIT RICH CAMERON'S CASH ££££ 

LORD ASHCROFT might be the Tory party's highest profile donor and tax avoider, but he's not the only one. According to the latest Electoral Commission report, David Cameron has also recruited Mike Peagram, who has given the party £52,801 - buying him membership of the "Leader's Group". This entitles him to attend lunches, dinners and receptions with Cameron and other senior party figures.

In 2001 Peagram made £44m selling his chemical firm and promptly moved to Monaco for five years to avoid paying an estimated £13m in capital gains tax. He has now returned to the UK. In 2006, while still avoiding UK tax, he told a forum of Monaco entrepreneurs that he prizes "winning with honour and playing by the rules ... and not cheating".

Elsewhere, Cameron has also been able to attract more bankers and financiers to help fund his crusade to "take power away from the political elite and hand it to the man and woman on the street".

Donors include "man on the street" Jitesh Gadhia, "global head of advisory" at Barclays Capital, who gave £50,000 and in January told the World Economic Forum at Davos: "Bankers here feel frustrated and apprehensive: frustrated that populism is hijacking the development of rational and logical reforms, and apprehensive that their arguments will simply be ignored however sensible they might be."

In his day job Jitesh advises on mergers and acquisitions. He helped India's Tata Steel take over the Anglo-Dutch firm Corus, a deal that has led to thousands of job losses and the "mothballing" of Corus's Redcar plant.

Millionaire property developer Nicholas Trimmatis, who also gave the Tories £50,000, could help Cameron get closer to the man on the street - but only in the pricier bits of London. They can stay at his Parkes Hotel in Knightsbridge for £600 a night or buy one of his Beaufort Gardens flats for £3.5m.

Chris Rokos, founder of the hedge fund Brevan Howard, also chipped in £50,000. He used around £38m of his £90m fortune in 2008 to create an eight-bedroom house in Notting Hill. To show how "street" he is, it has its own climbing wall, cinema, swimming pool, 16ft-deep diving pool and basement garage with car lift. To win planning permission from Kensington and Chelsea council, he had to pay £500,000 towards social housing in the borough.

Rokos has other boltholes including a £6m penthouse in Manhattan and a £5m penthouse in Miami. His firm recently opened an office in Geneva in case new regulations or taxes oblige them to avoid the man on the street in the UK and move to Switzerland.

The better late than never show
DAVID CAMERON's call for a "new politics" based on "openness, transparency and accountability" has been spoilt by a lack of transparency in his party's accounts and its late registration of donors.

In their latest Electoral Commission return, the Tories admitted to £637,069 of donations that should have been reported in early 2009.

The late-registered donors include Vivian Imerman, the man from Del Monte, who gave £75,000 in early 2009. Imerman made hundreds of millions selling the fruit juice firm and his current divorce from Lisa Tchenguiz suggests a lifestyle somewhat remote from the man in the street.

Lisa wants a £100m payoff - what would be the biggest UK divorce settlement ever. Sadly, the divorce seems fractious. While Lisa was away skiing, Vivian sent his chauffeur to retrieve the £250,000 Rolls Royce she uses. He was then locked out of the office he shares with Lisa's brothers, property tycoons Vincent and Robert Tchenguiz, and 20,000 documents were downloaded from his computer.

Awkwardly for Call Me Dave, both sides of this bitter fight are Tory funders: Lisa Tchenguiz gave the Tories £100,000 in 2008, and brother Robert has given them £11,200.

Another £50,000 donation that slipped past the press thanks to late registration came from Ian Taylor, boss of controversial oil firm Vitol. He made his latest donation in March 2009, but it only appeared in figures released this year. His past support for the Tories attracted controversy, not least because his firm had been guilty of "grand larceny in the first degree", admitting in a New York court in 2008 that it had paid $13m kickbacks [ see Vitol Fined $17.5 Million For Bribing Saddam Hussein ] to officials in Saddam's Iraq in connection with oil purchases.

The "late donations" return also meant that another £100,000 from hedge fund manager Crispin Odey made in March 2009 attracted no attention. He has argued against high taxes for the rich and tighter regulation for banks, but suggestions that he would quit Britain in protest turned out to be untrue.

Oil's well?
DESPITE the Tories' fondness for "transparency", the Electoral Commission report reveals that the party has accepted £100,000 from Middle East-focused oil and construction firms via obscure subsidiaries that are not easily linked to the companies behind the money. This is not illegal but it's hardly transparent.

One candidate for "Leader's Group"

All A

membership is the "CC Property Company", which gave £50,000 in the latest quarter. Company registrations describe it as a London property rental film. But inspection of the accounts shows the Knightsbridge company is an arm of construction giant Consolidated Contractors, which was founded in Lebanon, has its HQ in Athens and builds across the Middle East.

Chelsea-based Lebanese citizen Marwan Salloum is the main director of the CC Property Company as well as being Consolidated Contractors' vice-president for oil and gas. He is also a member of the Libyan British Business Council, which wants government support for trade with Colonel Gaddafi and lobbied for the release of Lockerbie bomb prisoner Abdelbaset Al Megrahi - an act Cameron denounced as the "release of this mass murderer".

OCI UK Ltd, a St Albans-based advertising firm, also gave the Tories £50,000 in the last quarter. Its only director, Kevin Struve, is an American citizen living in Bahrain. OCI's accounts explain the set-up. Its "principal activity" is "providing advertising, public relations and information processing services to Orascom Construction Industries of Egypt, the ultimate parent company" .

In fact the Tories' £50,000 donation comes from Orascom Construction, which is owned by the billionaire Egyptian Saw iris family, whose empire stretches across North Africa and the Middle East, running from oil services to mobile phones. Family member Samih Sawiris was named as a partner of Alexander Lebedev in his bid to buy the Independent newspaper, but he firmly denied any involvement.

Meanwhile politically-active Turkish

businessman Huseyin Gun gave the Tories £50,000 in his own name. Gun is on the advisory board of Global Strategy Forum, a think tank whose board includes top Tories Michael Ancram, Pauline Neville-Jones, Lord Lamont and Malcolm RiJkind. Gun describes himself as the "principal investor & managing director of Avicenna Capital", a privately-owned investment firm focusing on sectors like "oil & gas" and a key investor in Iraq.

However, Companies House documents for Avicenna Capital show the firm has been dormant since 2006 and that Mr Gun is a Turkish citizen living in a tower block in Istanbul. This suggests he must have acquired British or EU citizenship recently as a Turkish national could not be registered to vote here and so not donate to a UK political party.

Syrian-born Briton Ayman Adfari, chief executive of British-based oil firm Petrofac, which invests across the Middle East as well as the North Sea, also gave £50,000. Its activities include an interest in Iran where it has completed a $265bn oil terminal. It sees Iran as an eventual "growth driver" - a bit at odds with the Tory call for a "Europe-wide ban on investment in Iranian oil and gas".