The former Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor has been busy scooping up jobs and renewing acquaintances since being sacked. His friends tell us all we need to know about him. One is a bit of an islamophobe.
Since October when he was replaced Brandon has been very busy. Picking up jobs such as adviser to the CEO and board of property developer Thakeham Homes and director of a group of private schools in Essex. These should help him cope with cost of living crisis by brining in about £120,000 per year.
There is of course nothing sinister about these as MPs are not prevented from having other jobs, although it is uncertain how he manages to do these as well as his constituency work.
He has also accepted £5000 and the use of a helicopter from Maurizio Bragagni, a wealthy industrialist and Tory donor. Bragagni has been attracting a lot of attention for his comments on Italian news site Saturno Notizie. His comments such as “Muslims vote for Labour”, that Sharia Law was the “de facto law” in parts of some English cities and that the Labour Party has an “anti Judeo-Christian identity” that “allows Islamic groups to feel at home”. He also claimed that there is an “affinity between Islam and Labour has always existed”. When these comments were reported to Downing Street they distanced themselves so hard from these comments that they accepted another £10,000.donation from Bragagni.
So Brandon and the Tories are happy to spend time with and accept money from an islamophobe.
Still feeling financial pressure, Brandon has also accepted £30,000 in the last year from Lubov Chernukhin. She is the wife of former Russian Finance minister, Vladimir Chernukhin. The money she has given to Brandon and the Tories is loose change to the immensely wealthy Chernukhins with their convoluted web of offshore finances.
There is currently no suggestion that any of this money was acquired illegally or that there is any illegality in how it is managed.
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