Revealed: the international super rich bankrolling Robert Jenrick’s political ambitions

Calls for electoral laws to be tightened after Israeli billionaire and Australian hedge fund boss use companies that made minimal UK profits to give £40,000 to former immigration minister

Robert Jenrick has had quite the political transformation.

In recent months, the former immigration minister has posed for photo-ops at the Texas-Mexico border and lectured on mass migration at the Heritage Foundation, the Trumpist think tank that pays Liz Truss to give speeches.

Jenrick - who voted Remain in 2016 - even, eh, popped up at the ‘PopCons’ this week to say his own government has “betrayed the promise of Brexit.”  

Plenty has been written about Jenrick’s leadership ambitions (like this in the New Statesman this week). But less has been said about who is bankrolling Jenrick’s puff videos and globe-trotting.

So this newsletter took a look…. and found that in the last month alone Jenrick has accepted £40,000 from two companies, one owned by an Israeli billionaire, the other by an Australian hedge fund boss. 

Both firms gave more money to Jenrick than they made in profit over the last two financial years, raising concerns from transparency campaigners about the use of opaque companies to funnel money into British politics. 

Via Liberia 

In early April, ‘Robert Generic’ - as some Tories still call him - received a £35,000 donation from a company called Quantum Pacific Corporation UK Ltd. Never heard of them? You’re not alone. 

Quantum Pacific Corporation UK Ltd doesn’t seem to have a website. (Although it does have a LinkedIn page.)

Companies House records show that Quantum Pacific Corporation UK is ultimately owned by Gladebrooke Holdings Ltd, a company incorporated in… Monrovia, Liberia.

A bit more digging, however, reveals that all these companies are part of Idan Ofer’s $6.5 billion energy, shipping and mining empire.

Oder owns 100% of Quantum Pacific Corporation UK, as well as a slew of companies with similar names in secrecy jurisdictions such as Gibraltar, Guernsey and the British Virgin Islands. Quantum Pacific Group’s interests include oil and gas exploration. 

On April 30, Jenrick registered a £5,000 donation from another company, Firefly Digital Limited. Firefly Digital is ultimately owned by super-rich Australian hedge fund manager Hilton Nathanson, who also donated £5,000 to Michael Gove last year. 

In September, Firefly Digital filed dormant company accounts with Companies House, showing assets of just £1 and no profits.

‘Something seriously wrong with the rules’

Transparency campaigners have raised concerns that both Oder and Nathanson used companies to donate to Jenrick - and that neither firm made sufficient profits to cover their donations.

“The law is intended to provide transparency and controls over the provenance of funds in UK politics, yet it is increasingly clear it does neither sufficiently. That it can be so hard to identify where corporate donors' money comes from shows there's something seriously wrong with the rules,” Steve Goodrich, head of research and investigations at Transparency International, told this newsletter.

“As a minimum, businesses should only be able to donate if they can cover these costs from profits generated in the UK within the last two years.” 

The Electoral Commission has previously called for electoral law to be changed to prevent companies donating more money than they have made in the UK. 

Jenrick has history with some of his new donors. He described Idan Ofer as a “family friend” after concerns were raised when the two met in 2018 while Jenrick, then a junior Treasury minister, was considering a request for financial support from a mining project that would have rivalled Oder’s own firm Cleveland Potash.  

Oder’s Quantum Pacific Corporation UK previously donated £10,000 to the Conservatives, in 2019. A spokesperson for Oder later said that the donation was for the Conservative Friends of Israel. In January, Jenrick was one of six Tory MPs who travelled to Israel on a “special solidarity visit” paid for by the group.

Oder, who, alongside his wife, quit Harvard university’s executive board in protest at the response to the Hamas attacks in November, is reportedly relocating to London for “family reasons”. 

Jenrick has been positioning himself as a torch bearer on the Right of the Conservatives in recent months. In December, he resigned as immigration minister, saying that the government’s Rwanda legislation “does not go far enough”.  

He has also been caught in controversy, too. In 2020, Jenrick was accused of cronyism after he overruled the Tower Hamlets local authority in east London and the government planning inspectorate in favour of a housing development backed by Richard Desmond, the former porn baron, billionaire property developer and Conservative donor.

Desmond - who would have avoided tax of £45 million - donated £12,000 to Tories a fortnight after permission was granted. Jenrick later admitted his decision had been “unlawful by reason of apparent bias” - but refused to resign.

Robert Jenrick, Idan Oder and Hilton Nathanson have yet to respond to requests to comment on this story.