The Israeli-born former treasurer of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative party is suspected of funneling money from a wealthy Crimean businessman’s Russian bank account into Tory coffers, a report says report released Thursday.
Ehud Sheleg, whose family owns London’s posh Halcyon art gallery, was accused of donating $630,255 to Johnson’s election campaign in February 2018 – money that actually came from his stepfather Sergei Kopytov, a former pro-Kremlin politician and businessman in Crimea. , according to a bank alert detailed by The New York Times on Thursday.
According to the January 2021 alert, in early 2018, Kopytov transferred $2.5 million to an offshore account linked to a Sheleg family trust through a series of apparently dormant accounts belonging to Sheleg and his wife, Kopytov’s daughter, Liliia Sheleg. About a month later the money was transferred to a UK account shared by the couple, and a day later the donation of more than $630,000 was made to the Tories.
“We are able to trace a clear line from this donation to its ultimate source,” Barclays wrote in the alert, according to the report. “Kopytov can be said with considerable certainty that he was the true source of the donation.”
Why the alert was only issued three years after the donation was unclear.
Sheleg, Kopytov, the Tories and Johnson all denied wrongdoing or declined to comment.
A lawyer for Sheleg told the NYT that Kopytov sent the $2.5 million, which he got from a property sale, to the family trust as a gift and to pay off a loan. Sheleg borrowed money from the trust to donate to Johnson.
But Barclays officials noted that the accounts the money went through were empty before and after the transfers, suggesting they were being used to make the source more opaque.
Sheleg’s attorney said balances didn’t matter; the fact that his client did not need Kopytov’s money to make the donation was significant.
“There is absolutely no reason to suggest that Mr. Kopytov’s gift for his daughter was intended or for the purpose of making a political donation to the Conservative Party,” he said.
Kopytov also denied making a political donation, in a statement sent to the NYT via Sheleg’s lawyer.
“I have no interest in British politics,” he said, describing himself as a Ukrainian citizen. “Any donation made by my son-in-law to a British political party has nothing to do with me or the money I gave my daughter.”
It is illegal in the UK to accept political donations of more than 500 pounds ($610) from foreigners who cannot vote in Britain.
Asked about the report on Thursday, Johnson told Sky News that all party donations had been recorded “in the normal way” and noted that foreigners were not allowed to donate to political parties.
Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson leaves 10 Downing Street for the House of Commons to deliver a statement on Downing Street parties during the coronavirus lockdowns in London, April 19, 2022. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)
A Conservative Party spokesman declined to say whether the source of the money had ever been investigated. There is no indication that Johnson or the party knows the source of the money, nor is there any indication that law enforcement has pursued the matter or suspects wrongdoing.
The curators warmly embraced Sheleg, who was appointed treasurer after leading donations in 2019, the same year he was knighted. He leaves his position as treasurer in 2021.
According to the NYT, Sheleg has been flagged in the past for meetings with Russian officials or figures with suspected ties to Russian organized crime, despite frayed ties between Moscow and London. The newspaper noted that Russia-related donations increased while he was the top fundraiser.
Sheleg’s brother, Ran Sheleg, was a partner in an Israeli company trading binary options, a largely fraudulent investment vehicle now banned in Israel. Certain sectors of the industry were considered to have links with alleged Russian criminal enterprises.
Ran Sheleg, who is also a beneficiary of the family trust and listed as an officer of his brother’s Halcyon Gallery, denied involvement in any fraudulent activity. He told a 2019 survey that the binary options company had been a failure.
Bank alerts, known as suspicious activity reports in the United States, are notices that financial institutions file with law enforcement agencies if they report potentially suspicious activity, are generally kept confidential. . The NYT did not say how it obtained the Barclays report.
In 2020, more than 2,500 suspicious activity reports filed with the US Treasury Department were leaked to Buzzfeed and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, containing alerts from 90 banks, including Barclays.
