To see how easy it is for the wealthy to buy political access and influence, consider the story of the Tory donor Mohamed Amersi.
To see how easy it is for the wealthy to buy political access and influence, consider the story of the Tory donor Mohamed Amersi.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Born to a trading family in Kenya in 1960, three years before independence from Britain, Amersi attended Merchant Taylors’, a private school in Hertfordshire, before studying medicine and law at Sheffield University then at Cambridge.
It is Gove, a clever and gawky former journalist serving as David Cameron’s chief whip, to whom Amersi has the pleasure of listening during an intimate fundraiser in a 5 Hertford Street dining room in 2015.
He’s a non-dom – a tax status available to wealthy UK residents who say their main home is elsewhere and so pay fewer dues in Britain – and after all these years based in Dubai, Amersi’s not on the British electoral roll.
Lynton Crosby, the Tories’ Australian election guru, has a shopping list for the final week: £500,000 for Facebook videos, more for ads that wrap over the front pages of newspapers.
But at a lunchtime auction held by a Conservative organisation in May 2022, Amersi gives another £16,000 for the Thatcher Package (commemorative plate, autographed bottle of whisky, tea with two of the late Margaret’s colleagues) and dinner at a Green Park mansion with “four guests from the Westminster political scene”.
And Amersi is suing the BBC, over a Panorama documentary examining his role – minimal and unwitting, he says – in a TeliaSonera telecoms deal that the company later admitted involved bribing an Uzbek dictator’s daughter.
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