The Mystery of the Conservative Party's Hidden Donations

Why were a series of large donations to the Conservative Party redacted from their annual accounts?

There was something not quite right about the Conservative Party’s annual accounts, when they were published earlier this week.

The accounts, which set out the party’s income and expenditure for the year, are normally fairly unremarkable documents.

However, this year the names of certain major donors to the party were blacked out.

These redactions, to the list of donations made by ‘related parties’, were highly unusual.

In fact looking back through accounts of recent years I could only find isolated examples of any such redactions.

Yet this year’s accounts contained lots of them, in relation to what appeared to be very large sums donated to Rishi Sunak’s party.

So what was going on here?