Former Tory MP Andrew Bridgen broke House of Commons rules by failing to declare a donor’s loan of more than £4million, a parliamentary watchdog has found.
The standards committee told Mr Bridgen he was ‘wrong’ to think the cash – used in a legal fight with his brother over the family potato farm – was not a registrable interest.
The politician should have registered the interest-free loan totalling £4,470,576.42 within Parliament’s 28-day timeframe, according to a new report by the committee.
Mr Bridgen served as Conservative MP for North West Leicestershire between May 2010 and April 2023, when he was expelled from the party.
He lost the Tory whip after comparing the use of Covid vaccines to the Holocaust and went on to join the Reclaim Party before quitting the right-wing outfit after just seven months.
Mr Bridgen stood as an independent candidate at last year’s general election but won only 3 per cent of votes in North West Leicestershire and failed to be re-elected.
He receieved the interest-free loan from Jeremy Hosking, a businessman who has donated heavily to the Reclaim Party, between October 2020 and December 2023.
The financier, who has a stake in Crystal Palace Football Club, also loaned money to Mr Bridgen for accommodation during the same period – although this was declared.
In relation to the rules breach, the standards committee’s report detailed that payments were received by Mr Bridgen between October 12 2020 and December 18 2023.
These were recorded on December 19 2023 in the register of MPs’ interests.
But the standards commissioner found that the funding was registerable as an interest from October 12 2020, and ‘the first payment was therefore registered 1,135 days late’.
The committee report said the relationship between the political donor and Mr Bridgen means that the donation should have been declared, even though it was to pay for private legal costs.
There was no requirement for Mr Hosking to have ensured disclosure of the loans, which was Mr Bridgen’s responsibility.
Mr Bridgen argued that the money provided by Mr Hosking was not a registrable interest and therefore could not have been registered late.
He said there was no need to register it as it was related to a ‘strictly private’ matter, but that he ultimately did so ‘to ensure full transparency’ after it was mentioned in a public court case.
The politician was previously embroiled in a long legal wrangle with AB Produce, headed by his estranged younger brother Paul.
In 2022, Mr Bridgen was evicted from a £1.5million property owned by his family’s firm and order to pay out £800,000 in costs.
He was formerly a board member at the Derbyshire-based family business, which supplies vegetables to caterers, earning a second salary of £93,000 for attending monthly meetings.
A High Court judge ruled Mr Bridgen had ‘lied’ under oath, behaved in an ‘abusive’, ‘arrogant’ and ‘aggressive’ way, and was so dishonest that nothing he said about the dispute could be taken at face value.
The standards committee said they ‘hope that Mr Bridgen will now behave honourably and acknowledge that he was wrong’.
They added: ‘We agree with the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards that he should have apologised to the House.’