You do have to ask yourself what the motivation is for these donations,” Britain’s former attorney general said.
LONDON — It was a strongly worded warning from British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to Russian President Vladimir Putin: Invade Ukraine and there will be “significant consequences.”
Three days after that phone call last Dec. 13, Johnson’s Conservative Party received a donation of 66,500 pounds (nearly $88,000) from Lubov Chernukhin, the wife of one of Putin’s former deputy ministers.
In all, Chernukhin has donated more than 2 million pounds to the Conservative Party since 2012, making her one of the largest female donors in British political history, public records from the British Electoral Commission show.
Chernukhin says that she is a vehement critic of Putin and his war, and that none of her donations have been funded by corruption or improper means. Neither she nor her husband are among those who have been sanctioned by the the British government or others, and there is no suggestion either are guilty of any wrongdoing.
Her lawyers said in an email to NBC News that she disputed having historical links to the Kremlin because her husband, Vladimir, fled Russia in 2004 after being fired by the government and suffering harassment. (Vladimir Chernukhin used to chair Russia’s state development bank VEB, whose assets Britain froze after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.)
But she is far from alone. Lubov Chernukhin is just one of several Russia-linked millionaires and billionaires to donate large sums to the ruling Conservative Party.
For some experts and critics, this type of bankrolling exposes a contradiction at the heart of Britain’s response to the invasion: How can Johnson’s government claim to be one of Putin’s strongest opponents, when London — and the ruling party itself — is awash with Russian cash?
Accepting this flow of wealth into London was not only a risk in terms of money laundering but also national security, said Grieve, a longtime critic of Johnson’s.
That’s because many, but not all, Russian oligarchs are “intimately bound up with what can only be described as a mafia society — headed by the chief boss of the mafiosi, Mr. Putin,” he said.
For decades “the U.K. has been welcoming dirty Russian money with open arms,” agreed Bill Browder, an American-born hedge-fund manager based in London who is now a leading anti-Putin campaigner on corruption and human rights.
Although the Ukraine invasion “was a day of reckoning when everybody realized” that accepting Russian money “was enabling the murder of tens of thousands of people,” Browder is still skeptical that significant progress will be made in Britain or elsewhere.