The wife of a former Russian minister who
gave the Conservatives £1.8m, making her "the biggest female donor in recent British political history", with six female Cabinet members including the then PM. From Liz Truss's instagram from 2019.
The biggest single donor [who may be considered an oligarch] is the financier Lubov Chernukhin, who has donated £700,000. A British national since 2011, she is married to Vladimir Chernukhin, a former deputy finance minister under Putin. Documents published in the Pandora papers in October suggest he was allowed to leave Russia in 2004 with assets worth about $500m (£366m) and retain Russian business connections.
A Labour party calculation based on Electoral Commission information estimated that donors who had made money from Russia or Russians had given £1.93m to either the Tory party or constituency associations since Johnson became prime minister.
Others put the sum higher. Ian Blackford, the SNP's Westminster leader, to whom Johnson was replying in the Commons on Wednesday, said the Tories had raised £2.3m "from Russian oligarchs".
The industrialist Alexander Temerko, also a UK national, has donated £357,000 since Johnson took office. He is a minority shareholder and co-owner of a company called Aquind. Its majority investor is the Russian-born oil tycoon Viktor Fedotov.
Another big Tory donor in the Johnson era is the businessman Mohamed Amersi, who has given £258,000 over the period.
Amersi advised on a lucrative telecom deal in Russia in 2005 with a company that a Swiss tribunal subsequently found to be controlled by an associate of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Amersi told the Financial Times in July he had made $7m in the country, but only prior to 2008. "Not a penny that I earned in Russia … has even remotely come close to being invested in the UK political system," he said.
