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Former Conservative party chair Sir Brandon Lewis has taken a job advising an investment company set up and still partly owned by two sanctioned Russian oligarchs.
Lewis, a Tory MP, will join LetterOne, a London-based investment vehicle co-founded by billionaires Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven, who were placed on western sanctions lists following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The former security minister will become a senior adviser to LetterOne, which owns the retailer Holland & Barrett, and which has restructured itself to comply with the sanctions regime.
Lewis is expected to earn in the “low hundreds of thousands of pounds” for his work at LetterOne, according to people briefed on the appointment, well in excess of his MP’s salary of £86,584.
Lord Mervyn Davies, LetterOne chair, told the Financial Times: “The appointment of Brandon Lewis builds on the decisive changes we have been making following Russia’s illegal and immoral invasion of Ukraine.”
Davies said Lewis brought a “wealth of experience” to LetterOne, adding the company “sustained 100,000 jobs in over 40 businesses across the UK, EU and US” and had been transformed since sanctions were introduced.
“Today’s appointment follows the swift, robust and decisive action we undertook to distance L1 from its sanctioned shareholders,” said Davies, who served as a minister in the last Labour government.
Lewis’s appointment was this week cleared by the independent Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, which vets job applications by former ministers to avoid conflicts of interest.
However it is likely to raise eyebrows at Westminster, given that Fridman and Aven continue to hold 49 per cent of the shares in LetterOne.
Both they and their shares are subject to sanctions. The company itself is not sanctioned.
In December last year, the UK government forced LetterOne to sell its broadband business Upp, citing a “risk to national security” given the “ultimate beneficial owners of LetterOne Core Investments and Upp’s expanding full fibre broadband network”.
Lewis, an ally of former premier Boris Johnson, will lead Davies’s advisory council.
Lewis said: “LetterOne has travelled a huge distance since Putin’s abhorrent invasion of Ukraine.
“It is now fully separate from its sanctioned founders and focused on investments that are vital for society as well as being one of the biggest corporate donors of aid to Ukraine.”
Lewis, MP for Great Yarmouth, made the news in 2020 for receiving money from two British citizens with links to Russia.
Lewis declared donations of £25,000 from Lubov Chernukhin, a former banker who is the wife of Vladimir Chernukhin, former Russian deputy finance minister under Putin. Lewis also received a donation of £23,000 from Alexander Temerko, former chief of a Russian arms company.
“I think we need to be fairly clear about this so we don’t get the facts wrong — these are British citizens,” Lewis told the BBC at the time. “They are properly declared, we do not accept funds from foreign nationals.”
Davies said Lewis would bring a “breadth of experience” to LetterOne and help him manage the “geopolitical” challenges of reshaping the business following the sanctions.
“The Ukraine situation doesn’t get any better,” Davies added. He said LetterOne was “an old-style conglomerate” committed to businesses in areas such as healthcare, retail, energy and technology.
LetterOne said it had allocated “more than £45mn to support those affected by the illegal war in Ukraine”.
Labour was approached for comment but declined.