Newly published Downing Street diary files record Syrian-born businessman Wafic Said as a “donor” when he met then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson in September 2019 and when he took part in later calls, raising questions about whether the Conservative Party accepted donations from an impermissible source.
The files, covering much of Johnson’s time at Number 10 and seen by BBC News after being published by the US non-profit Distributed Denial of Secrets, show Mr Said described as the donor at a nearly 90-minute meeting with Johnson, his chief of staff and his political secretary less than two months after Johnson became prime minister. Separate logs record two phone calls between Johnson and Mr Said in 2020 and 2021. The entries label the encounters "political," indicating they related to Conservative Party matters rather than official government business and therefore were not obliged to be declared in government transparency records.
Under UK electoral law, donors must be on the UK electoral register or a UK-registered company carrying out business in the country, a rule intended to block foreign funding of political parties. Mr Said is not registered on the UK electoral roll and is therefore ineligible to make political donations. His wife, Rosemary Said, a British citizen who is resident in the UK, has been recorded as having donated about £2.6 million to the Conservative Party over the past 25 years. The couple have maintained that Mrs Said used her own funds for those donations and that Mr Said has not donated since 2000, when the rules were changed.
The Downing Street logs, however, identify Mr Said — rather than his wife — as the donor for the 2019 meeting. The logs also show Mr Said alone took part in two calls with Johnson, in 2020 and in 2021, with no entries recording Rosemary Said speaking to the prime minister. The 2020 call included then-party chairman Sir Ben Elliot, even though it would have been unlawful for Mr Said to make political donations. The 2021 call was recorded as taking place during a train journey back from Stoke-on-Trent to London, and Johnson placed two political calls during the trip: one to a donor and then to Mr Said.
Mr Said, 85, told BBC News he had known Johnson "long before he became prime minister" and said that because of his age he could not recall the telephone conversations recorded in the files. He said it was "entirely possible that he may have called to thank me for my contribution to Covid vaccine research." He also reiterated that his wife is "an independently wealthy woman who has been a strong supporter of the Conservative Party her entire life."
A Conservative Party spokesman said that "proper due diligence was undertaken to ensure that these donations were permissible and accurately reported" and warned that it would not comment on "purported leaked documents, which may have been obtained or manipulated by hostile state actors." Johnson did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr Said is a well-known businessman and philanthropist who helped broker the al-Yamamah arms deal in the 1980s, a multi-billion-pound arrangement that was the subject of a long-running Serious Fraud Office probe that was closed in 2006 on national interest grounds. There is no suggestion he was guilty of wrongdoing in relation to that deal; his philanthropic activity has included a major gift to the Said Business School at the University of Oxford.
Political donations by the Said family have been examined before. In 2009 the Electoral Commission opened a preliminary inquiry after donations were recorded under the name of Mr Said’s then-19-year-old daughter; the family said the entries arose from an administrative error and that the funds came from Mrs Said. Mr Said’s son, Khaled, who is eligible to donate, has also made political contributions.
Former Electoral Commission chief executive Bob Posner said parties are required to take all reasonable steps to establish the true source of donations and that the law prohibits donations from foreign sources. "Individuals and political parties must take all reasonable steps to establish who is the true donor and only accept that donation if certain that the true donor is legally permitted to make the donation," he said.
The files’ publication has prompted renewed scrutiny of long-standing questions about the provenance of some Conservative Party donations. The documents were published by Distributed Denial of Secrets, which archives leaked datasets; the organisation did not respond to a request about how the files were obtained. The records do not on their own prove that any law was broken, but they document interactions that legal experts and election watchdogs say merit review to determine whether donors were properly identified and whether party procedures for verifying permissible donors were followed.
Any formal determination about the permissibility of past donations would lie with the Electoral Commission or other relevant authorities. The recordings in the logs of political meetings and calls between Johnson and an individual not on the electoral roll add to a record that party officials, donors and regulators may examine as part of ongoing public interest scrutiny.