THE Tories have been given £5 million in a single donation, the largest handed to the party in more than two decades.
Mohamed Mansour, a billionaire who served as a transport minister under former Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, said the huge donation was a show of “confidence” in Rishi Sunak as Prime Minister.
Mansour’s donation is greater than the total the Tory Party received in the entire last quarter of 2022 – which was £4,858,373 according to Electoral Commission records.
In the same quarter, a total of £538,339 was donated to the SNP and £7,220,437 to the Labour Party.
Writing in the Telegraph, the Egyptian-born billionaire and senior treasurer for the Conservatives explained why he had made the donation.
“I believe that this country has a very capable Prime Minister,” Mansour wrote. “One who understands how growth is generated in the modern economy. He gets the importance of technology and innovation. He can make the modern economy work for all UK citizens.
“My confidence in the Prime Minister is why I was proud to become a senior treasurer of the Conservative Party last December. I want to give him the best chance of having a full five-year term and so have donated £5m to the party’s election fighting fund. I look at what he has achieved in his first months in office and think what he could do in five years.”
David Sainsbury, a former chairman of the supermarket chain Sainsbury’s which was set up by his great grandfather, gave the biggest single donation in British political history to the LibDems ahead of the 2019 General Election. The “Lord Sainsbury of Turville” gave the party £8m.
Mansour’s £5m donation to the Tories is the largest single donation the party has been given since 2001 when Paul Getty – an heir to the Getty Oil Company fortune – donated the same amount.
In February, the Mirror reported that Mansour arranged secret dinner parties for super-rich VIPs to have privileged access to top Tory ministers.
The paper said that Mansour held monthly events at his home in London’s Belgravia, with groups of wealthy businessmen allowed to quiz ministers including Sunak, Michael Gove, and Kwasi Kwarteng on whatever subject they chose.
Guest would later be approached to donate to the Tories, according to the report, but ministers kept them hidden from official declarations, claiming they were not political events in nature.
