London: Labour leader Ed Miliband has said that the prime minister has “questions to answer” over Conservative party donations from Russian oligarchs, as EU leaders debate imposing sanctions on Moscow.
Calls by David Cameron for tougher curbs in response to the Ukraine crisis were undermined last week after it emerged that the Tories had accepted a £160,000 (Dh587,680) donation from the wife of a former Russian finance minister for a tennis game with the prime minister and Boris Johnson, the London mayor, at a fundraising auction. Lubov Chernukhin, the banker and wife of Vladimir Chernukhin, made the winning bid at this month’s Conservative summer party.
Miliband raised his concerns about the Tories’ financial links with Russian figures, telling the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show that the prime minister needed to be more open about his fundraising arrangements.
“David Cameron does have questions to answer on the money he’s taking from Russian oligarchs, on the bidding for a tennis match,” the Labour leader said. “You know, frankly, you can’t stand up one minute and say, this is the biggest issue and we’re going to take the right action, you’ve got to really look very very carefully on who he’s getting money from.”
Miliband also called on the EU to step up its diplomacy in response to the shooting down of a Malaysian airlines flight in Eastern Ukraine, and suggested that the European Council should meet to discuss next steps. “The heads of government of Europe should be meeting, they shouldn’t just be leaving it to the foreign ministers,” he said. “We need to raise sanctions on Russia, on individual corporations that have been part of what happened around the big decisions that have been made.”
Debate about how to respond to the downing of the Malaysia Airlines aeroplane has raged in Europe this week, with the head of France’s ruling Socialist party accusing Cameron of hypocrisy for urging Paris to scrap the sale of two Mistral-class warships to Russia, while London was acting as a refuge for wealthy Russians. Pressure on Cameron over Russian donations intensified further when the widow of murdered spy Alexander Litvinenko said he should return the tennis match donation. “If David Cameron doesn’t want to appear like he is being bought, I think he should return this money,” she said.
Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, stepped up his rhetoric against Russia on Sunday as he suggested that the country should be stripped of its role in hosting the 2018 World Cup.
The Liberal Democrat leader said it was “unthinkable” at present that the tournament could go ahead in the country blamed by the West for supplying arms to Ukrainian separatist rebels accused of shooting down the Malaysia airlines flight.
Although Fifa, football’s world governing body, had ruled out calls from some German politicians for Russia to be boycotted, Clegg told The Sunday Times that allowing it to go ahead without a change of course by Russian President Vladimir Putin would make the world look “weak and so insincere” in its condemnation of Moscow.
“Vladimir Putin himself has to understand that he can’t have his cake and eat it,” the deputy prime minister told the newspaper. “You can’t have this — the beautiful game marred by the ugly aggression of Russia on the Russian-Ukrainian border.”
Separately, it has been reported that lawyers from London law firm McCue & Partners have flown to Ukraine for discussions about how victims’ families could bring a class-action lawsuit against Putin for Russia’s alleged role in the shooting down of the plane. The case will be pursued in the American courts, according to the Sunday Telegraph.
— Financial Times
