An article in the New York Times has just been published. It tells a story that sounds more like some sort of geopolitical thriller involving Russia, dark money deals and Britain’s scandal-ridden Prime Minister.
Boris Johnson has been accused of many things – corruption, cronyism, nepotism, lying deceipt, misogyny, racism and many more, in fact, too many to list here. He was also accused of trying to bury the Russia Report that when it was eventually released, was so heavily redacted as to be worthless. Then we have all the lawbreaking, both domestic and international, partygate, fines galore and so on.
But there’s another scandal. The NYT says that one of the biggest donors to the Tory party is suspected of secretly funnelling hundreds of thousands of pounds to the party from a Russian account, according to a bank alert filed to the National Crime Agency.
The donation, of around half a million pounds, was made in February 2018 in the name of Ehud Sheleg, a wealthy London art dealer who was most recently the Conservative Party’s treasurer.
Apparently, the dark money deal was part of a fund-raising effort that helped to propel Boris Johnson and his party to his 80 seat victory in the 2019 general election.
However, documents filed with the authorities last year and reviewed by The New York Times say that the money originated in a Russian account of Mr. Sheleg’s father-in-law, Sergei Kopytov. kopytov was once a senior politician in the previous pro-Kremlin government of Ukraine. He now owns real estate and hotel businesses in Crimea and Russia.
“We are able to trace a clear line back from this donation to its ultimate source,” Barclays bank wrote in a January 2021 alert to the National Crime Agency. The bank flagged the donation as both suspected money laundering and a potentially illegal campaign donation.
Needless to say, lawyers for Mr Sheleg have denied any wrongdoing
Of course, in Britain, it is illegal for political parties to accept donations of more than £500 from foreign citizens who are not registered to vote in Britain. This rule seems to have been brazenly flouted on a number of occasions when it came to the 2016 EU referendum.
Mr Kopytov is not listed on the national voter register. In addition, quite why Barclays Bank made this public knowledge three years after the event of the donation is a mystery. In fact, it is not clear quite what the NCA has done about it – if anything.
The NYT comments, quite rightly that – “British leaders looked the other way, even as the Kremlin sowed disinformation, meddled in elections and tried to co-opt politicians.”
It appears that questions to Boris Johnson, the Conservative party and the National Crime Agency have all been met with a shrug of the shoulders.
In addition, the story involves Russia’s ambassador in London at the height of the fallout from the annexation of Crimea, a businessman in Cyprus accused of connections to organized Russian crime groups and the president of the Russian republic of Tatarstan.
According to Private Eye Magazine – during Sheleg’s time as treasurer, the party received a surge in Russia-linked donations. Mr. Sheleg also donated generously himself: a total of £3.8 million from 2017 to 2020.
This is the state of British politics under the Boris Johnson administration. It is immersed in shadowy dark-money backroom deals, foreign state interventions into British democracy and a form of malfeasance in public office that should have been met with far more serious consequences than it has some time ago.