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Conservatives refuse to hand back £1.7m from Russian donor

Lubov Chernukhin is married to the Russian president's former deputy finance minister - Guilhem Baker/London News Pictures Ltd
Lubov Chernukhin is married to the Russian president's former deputy finance minister - Guilhem Baker/London News Pictures Ltd

A Russian oligarch closely linked to Vladimir Putin paid millions of pounds to the husband of one of the Conservative Party's biggest donors, according to an investigation.

Lubov Chernukhin, a banker married to the Russian president's former deputy finance minister, has given at least £1.7 million to the Conservatives, Electoral Commission records show.

Mrs Chernukhin has also met Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his two Conservative predecessors as PM, Theresa May and David Cameron.

Leaked files seen by the BBC's Panorama programme show that her husband, Vladimir Chernukhin, received £6.1 million, initially coming from a politician who has been sanctioned in the US over his relationship with the Kremlin.

Mr Chernukhin was sent the money in 2016 from a British Virgin Islands company linked to Suleyman Kerimov, according to a major leak of banks' "suspicious activity reports" that have been called the "FinCEN Files".

Mr Kerimov, a gold magnate who sits in the upper house of Russia's parliament, was put under investigatio in France last March over an alleged tax fraud involving luxury villas on the Riviera. He strongly denied any wrongdoing and was planning to challenge it, his lawyers said in a statement last year.

The claims prompted the Labour MP Chris Bryant to call for the Conservatives to return Mrs Chernukhin's money.

"Successive Tory prime ministers have been utterly complacent and naive about accepting vast slabs of cash from Russian cronies of Putin," he said. "The Conservative Party should return every penny it has received from Lubov Chernukhin now."

The Labour MP Chris Bryant has called on the Conservatives to return the money - Heathcliff O'Malley
The Labour MP Chris Bryant has called on the Conservatives to return the money - Heathcliff O'Malley

However, the party insisted it would not be returning the donations. A spokesman said: "There are people in this country of Russian origin who are British citizens and have the democratic right to donate to a political party.

"Many have been vocal critics of Putin and it is completely wrong and discriminatory to smear them all with the same brush."

A party source added: "Mrs Lubov Chernukhin has lived in Britain for many years and is a British citizen, which gives her the democratic and legal right to donate to a political party.

"The Chernukhins are not allies of Mr Putin. Mr Chernukhin was dismissed from his role as head of a state bank in 2004 for his loyalty to Mikhail Kasyanov, a vocal critic of Mr Putin, and subsequently had to leave the country."

Ms Chernukhin began donating to the Conservatives in 2012, with the majority coming after the alleged payment linked to Mr Kerimov was reportedly made in April 2016.

The influence of Russia in UK public life has come under scrutiny after Parliament's intelligence and security committee has warned that successive Governments had "welcomed the oligarchs and their money with open arms" and allowed them to forge "connections at the highest levels with access to UK companies and political figures".

At the weekend, The Telegraph revealed how Lord Barker of Battle, a former Tory minister, was paid £6 million by a company linked to an ally of Mr Putin last year.

Lord Barker – who as the Conservative MP Greg Barker was climate change minister from 2010 to 2014 – received the sum in 2019 from EN+, an energy company in which Oleg Deripaska, a billionaire oligarch and friend of Mr Putin, has a 35 per cent stake.

The payment – disclosed in the EN+ annual report – comprised a salary of $1.9 million and a "discretionary bonus" of $5.9 million, making him one of the UK's highest-earning peers.

Lord Barker took a leave of absence from the Lords in February last year and told The Telegraph that "only a very small proportion of the sum in question relates to the first two months of 2019" when he was an active peer.

He said he had not returned to the Lords since taking his leave of absence and added that he backed peers being required to disclose their earnings from third parties.