The Conservatives have accepted a £5m donation from an Egyptian-born billionaire who served as a minister in the government of the former president Hosni Mubarak.
Mohamed Mansour, who was made senior treasurer of the Conservatives in December, announced he had given the sum to the party, its biggest one-off donation for more than 20 years.
Writing in the Telegraph, Mansour, who served as a transport minister under Mubarak from 2006 to 2009, said he had given the money to assist Rishi Sunak, whom he described as “a very capable prime minister” who understood the economy.
Mansour is the chair of the Mansour Group multinational corporation, which he owns with two of his brothers. Through another of his companies, Unatrac, he has previously donated about £600,000 to the Tories.
The new donation is the biggest for the Conservatives since Paul Getty gave the same sum to the party in 2001.
When Mansour was given his Conservative party treasurer role, Labour said Sunak could not claim to stand up for integrity when there was “a billionaire who was a part of Hosni Mubarak’s autocratic regime being put in charge of drumming up donations”.
In his article, Mansour wrote: “I believe that this country has a very capable prime minister, 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.”
Mansour’s donation will notably boost Tory coffers before an election expected next year; they have suffered recently amid an assumption the party is likely to lose power.
Over 2022 as a whole, Labour received more total donations than the Tories – slightly more than £5m, as against £4.75m.
Mansour’s sum is not the biggest single political donation in recent years. Before the 2019 general election, David Sainsbury gave £8m to the Liberal Democrats, despite being a Labour peer at the time.
