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A billionaire allegedly behind a €2.4 million “strawman” donation to Germany’s far-right AfD party is linked to a company that has been making use of a UK loophole to give large sums of money to the Conservative Party.
Alternative for Germany is currently under police investigation after Der Spiegel in Germany and Der Standard, an Austrian newspaper, reported that the party had incorrectly attributed the donation to a regional politician called Gerhard Dingler.
The news outlets claimed Dingler served as a frontman for Henning Conle, a Swiss-German property tycoon whose family is estimated to be worth more than £1 billion.
A joint investigation by Tortoise and BBC Radio 4’s The Naked Week has established a link between Conle and a series of donations made in the UK.
Conle was until a few weeks ago the co-director of a letting and real estate company called Strandbrook Limited. He stepped down on 21 March, just over a month after Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office and its Austrian counterpart opened their investigation into the AfD, according to company documents.
Since 2020, Strandbrook has made £250,000 of donations to the Conservative party-aligned Carlton Club and its political committee. Strandbrook’s “ultimate controlling company” is Cartina 80 Establishment, a company incorporated in Liechtenstein, according to its accounts for the year to April 2024.
The most recent sum registered by the UK’s Electoral Commission from Strandbrook to the Carlton Club political committee was £50,000, given in January when Conle was still a director.
As well as being a private members’ club, the Carlton Club operates an unincorporated association (UA), which in turn gives cash donations to the Conservative Party. Since 2001, the Carlton Club Political Committee has donated £1.3 million to various party associations and individuals.
No rules have been broken by Strandbrook, the Carlton Club or the Conservatives and there is no suggestion of wrongdoing. However, there are concerns that UAs present a growing challenge to the integrity of the UK electoral system.
A House of Commons report from this year noted that UAs “do not have to conduct permissibility checks on their own donors; anyone, including foreign nationals can donate to them…This means that they could legitimately make donations using funding from otherwise impermissible sources, including from overseas.”
According to Politico Influence, £12 million has been donated in all by UAs since 2022.
Conle did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for the Carlton Club Political Committee said it had “complied with Electoral Law in respect of all political donations”.
Tom Brake, director of Unlock Democracy, urged the government to “close down the massive loophole that allows foreign money, through UAs, to get into our politics”. He described UAs as “a gaping hole in our defences against dodgy donations”, adding: “They let foreign donors, who otherwise can only give £500 to political parties here, slide untraceable and substantial amounts of cash into UK politics, buying influence and leverage, which is invisible to the general public, circumventing the transparency rules that apply to money donated in other ways.”
This is the latest in a series of investigations by Tortoise and BBC Radio 4’s The Naked Week, hosted by Andrew Hunter Murray. To hear the full investigation, listen to The Naked Week, produced for BBC Radio 4 by Unusual Productions, on air every Friday from 18.30 on BBC Radio 4 and then on BBC Sounds in the Friday Night Comedy podcast feed.
Additional reporting by Freya Shaw and Matt Brown.
Photo credit: Alamy
