Peter de Putron, a banker who lives in Guernsey and is married to Leadsom’s sister Hayley, also made a further £1m of donations to a party-backed campaign and a rightwing thinktank, the Guardian reports.
Leadsom herself said that she was unaware of the donations made by a member of her own family, but a Labour MP asked whether the payments in effect amounted to a “cash for political office” arrangement.
The payments from De Putron included cheques to the Conservative party totalling £200,000 in 2010, £66,600 in 2011, £129,800 in 2012, and £204,760 in 2013, made by a company called Gloucester Research, plus further, smaller sums to her local constituency party.
De Putron also made smaller payments directly to Leadsom to hire staff, plus £300,000 to the Conservative-backed “no to voting reform” campaign, and a total of £680,000 to Open Europe, a thinktank promoting Cameron-style reforms of the EU, with which Leadsom is personally associated.
Donations to British politicians from the Channel Islands are banned. But the Leadsom payments were legally permissible because they were made through UK-registered companies.
Details of the family relationships have emerged following an unprecedented leak of the identities of thousands of wealthy offshore clients who bank with a major Channel Isles private bank.
