Former Egypt Mubarak regime minister 'donates £5million to UK Conservative Party'

The UK Conservative Party has reportedly received a hefty £5million donation from Mohamed Mansour, an Egyptian-born billionaire businessman and ex-minister in former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's autocratic regime. 

The donation is the largest made to the governing UK Conservative Party since Paul Getty gave the same amount in 2001 and it will be a major lift to their finances for the next general election, likely to take place next year. 

Writing in The Telegraph, Mansour, who served as transport minister under Mubarak from 2006-2009, explained: "I want to give [Sunak] the best chance of having a full five-year term and so have donated £5 million to the party’s election fighting fund … I look at what he has achieved in his first months in office and think what he could do in five years."

In 2016, Mansour reportedly donated £600,000 to the Tories through his company Unatrac, while he was controversially made a senior treasurer of the party last year.

At the time, Annaliese Dodds, Chair of the opposition Labour Party, criticised the appointment, commenting that after the long list of Tory corruption scandals they had now put "a billionaire who was a part of Hosni Mubarak’s autocratic regime … in charge of drumming up donations".

Mansour has primarily made his billions through his company the Mansour Group, which is the primary distributor of US companies such as Caterpillar, Chevrolet and General Motors in Egypt.

He was then appointed as transport minister at a time when the Mubarak regime, which was later ousted as part of the Arab Spring, was criticised by rights groups and opposition figures for large scale corruption, as well as autocratic and authoritarian practices. He quit the role and came to the UK in 2010.   
 

Mansour’s time in the UK and his association with the Tory Party has been particular controversial. Earlier this year, it was reported by The Mirror that during the tenure of Boris Johnson’s premiership, Mansour had hosted parties where super-rich VIPs could gain access to high profile government ministers, including current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. 

More recently, the same Unatrac firm owned by Mansour that previously donated to the Tories was forced to cease dealings with Russia after it was found to have been supplying machinery to the Russian oil and gas industry after the invasion of Ukraine.  

The New Arab reached out to both the Conservative Party and the Egyptian Embassy for comment but received no reply at the time of publication.