Top Tory has family link with offshore banker who gave party £800,000
An offshore financier who is the brother-in-law of financial services minister Andrea Leadsom has donated £816,000 to the Conservative party since she first successfully ran for parliament at the last election.
Peter de Putron, a banker who lives in Guernsey and is married to Leadsom's sister Hayley, also made a further £1m of donations to a party-backed campaign and a rightwing thinktank. Leadsom herself said that she was unaware of the donations made by a member of her own family, but a Labour MP asked whether the payments in effect amounted to a "cash for political office" arrangement.
The payments from De Putron included cheques to the Conservative party totalling £200,000 in 2010, £66,600 in 2011, £129,800 in 2012, and £204,760 in 2013, made by a company called Gloucester Research, plus further, smaller sums to her local constituency party.
De Putron also made smaller payments directly to Leadsom to hire staff, plus £300,000 to the Conservative-backed "no to voting reform" campaign, and a total of £680,000 to Open Europe, a thinktank promoting Cameron-style reforms of the EU, with which Leadsom is personally associated. Donations to British politicians from the Channel Islands are banned. But the Leadsom payments were legally permissible because they were made through UK-registered companies....
(More at link):
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jul/08/andrea-leadsom-family-links-offshore-bank-donations-tories
All perfectly legal. But surely this sort of thing is not good for government. If we don't watch it, we'll end up owned by rich lobbyists and donors, like the USA is already.