LABOUR is seeking “billionaire cash” to replace lost subscription money caused by large numbers of members resigning. Attempts to find big money donors have met with only limited success but shadow cabinet ministers are attracting individual donors to fund their offices.  

The current register of MPs’ interests show Labour’s top recipients of these donations include shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves (£279,000), shadow health secretary Wes Streeting (£133,000), shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper (£71,000) and shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson (£42,000). The donations favour the right of the party and bring controversial donors into apparently more direct contact with policymakers.

Last year Reeves accepted £10,000 from Richard Flint “to support the shadow chancellor’s office.” Flint was a director of Sky Betting, a gambling firm fined £1 million when he was in charge for failing to protect vulnerable gamblers. He is currently a director of Flutter PLC, the gambling giant owner of Sky Betting, Paddy Power and other betting brands. Flint was a former Lib Dem donor.

Last November Neil Goulden also paid £10,000 to support Reeves’s office. Goulden is one of the biggest figures in the British gambling industry. From 2016 to 2021 Goulden was chairman of Gamesys, a firm making the “tech” behind online games. Under his leadership Gamesys merged with Jackpotjoy, the company running online gambling games like “Doubly Bubbly” or “Search for the Phoenix.”  

Goulden was the full-time chairman of Gala Coral from 2001-2014 when it was a gambling giant running casinos, bookmakers and bingo halls. In 2016 the UK Gambling Commission fined Gala Coral £880,000 for failures that happened between 2012 and 2015, when Goulden was chairman.  

The firm’s racing and online gambling divisions allowed a customer to gamble away £800,000 he had stolen from a vulnerable adult. The commission concluded the case showed “systemic faults” over its anti-money laundering and social responsibility approaches. Goulden has been close to the Labour Party in the past, donating around £54,000 to Labour between 2010 and 2014.

Reeves’s office is also supported by some other past Labour donors. Former banker Victor Blank has given £100,000. These are Blank’s first donations to the Labour Party since 2015. David Sainsbury, the supermarket heir, gave £35,000 to fund Reeves’s office in May 2022.  

Sainsbury funded Labour very heavily in the Tony Blair years and also funded Progress, the main Blairite organisation. However, he has not made any other Labour donations since 2016, and in 2019 gave a staggering £8 million to the Lib Dems.

Gambling industry execs also back other frontbenchers. Last December shadow health secretary Streeting accepted “£5,000 towards staffing costs in my office” from Red Capital Ltd, a company owned and controlled by Jon Mendelsohn, the chairman of 888 Holding PLC, the company behind bookies William Hill and multiple online casino, bingo and poker websites.  

This March the Gambling Commission fined 888 PLC £9.4m, one of its largest ever fines, for “social responsibility and money-laundering failings.” Examples of these failings include not checking on a customer “who lost £37,000 in a six-week period during the Covid-19 pandemic” or “giving a customer they knew was an NHS worker earning £1,400 a month a monthly deposit cap of £1,300.”

Mendelsohn has a long association with New Labour. He was a director of Blairite group Progress from 2007 to 2019.

Streeting has also take cash from a top Tory donor. This January, John Armitage gave £15,000 “towards staffing costs” in Streeting’s office. Armitage runs hedge fund Egerton Capital. Between 2014 and 2020 Armitage gave £2.1m to the Tories, including a £1m donation to help the Tories run the 2017 election and £300,000 to help the Tories in the 2019 election.  

Recent US filings show that Egerton owns $540m of shares — one of Egerton’s larger shareholdings is in UnitedHealth, the US health giant interested in NHS outsourcing.

Streeting has also taken £12,500 “office” cash from Anthony Watson, chief executive of the Bank of London, a new tech-oriented banking firm, and from rich men who previously funded New Labour like Trevor Chinn.   

Most of Yvette Cooper’s “office fund” has come through businessman Peter Hearn (via his company MPM Connect). Hearn helped fund Cooper’s failed 2015 Labour leadership campaign, but he has a history of donating both to the Labour and Tory parties.

Shadow foreign secretary David Lammy attacked the Tories for being “just as hooked on Russian-linked money as any of the worm-tongued servicers of oligarchical wealth.” But Last November Lammy accepted £25,000 to fund his staff from Jeanne Marie Davies, wife of Lord Mervyn Davies.  

Since 2015 Davies has been a director of investment firm Letter One Holdings, founded by Russian oligarchs Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven. EU sanctions lists described Fridman as “a top Russian financier and enabler of Putin’s inner circle” and Aven as “one of Vladimir Putin’s closest oligarchs.”  

With Davies on the board, Letter One acted as an investment vehicle for Russian oligarchs, buying up Western firms like high street health chain Holland and Barrett.  

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its sanctioning by the EU at the end of February, Fridman and Aven stood down from Letter One’s board. Davies rejected calls to quit Letter One, saying he will continue to steward the company while the oligarchs’ “assets in the business are effectively frozen.”  

Davies says if sanctions are lifted “the board is under no obligation to return these rights” to the oligarchs — but did not say they definitely wouldn’t get them back if circumstances allow.   

Labour has repeatedly claimed that business donors influence Tory policy, with Angela Rayner saying the government “put the interests of the donors who bankroll the Conservative Party ahead of the interests of the public.” However, Labour have been reluctant to discuss the very direct business support of its own front bench.