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Shop the collectionThe Prosperity Institute supports Trump, fossil fuels and ‘independent and sovereign’ nations. But it’s funded by a shadowy network based in tax havens.
In her debut video for the Prosperity Institute, former home secretary Suella Braverman inveighs against the 46 judges who sit “hundreds of miles away” at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. But a Good Law Project investigation has revealed that this rightwing think-tank is fuelled by dark money that flows into London from much further away – the notorious tax haven of the British Virgin Islands.
The operating costs for the Prosperity Institute, which shares four of its owners with GB News, are met by the injection of millions each year from a parent company based in the British Virgin Islands (BVI). According to its latest full accounts, the institute’s multimillion-pound losses are covered by Legatum Global Holdings.
The institute rents out its grand HQ – a four-story townhouse in west London – at only $1 a year from another BVI company, called Basswood Properties Limited. And the directors of this chain of holding companies are scattered across the world in low-tax jurisdictions, such as the Cayman Islands, Malta and the UAE.
This complex global structure is similar to the network of donors linked to tax havens backing Reform UK that Good Law Project revealed last year.
The structure may also have allowed money from the BVI to sidestep British electoral rules banning foreign political donations.
The UK-based Prosperity Institute donated £60,000 to the rightwing New Conservatives parliamentary group, led by Danny Kruger MP, in the lead-up to the general election. Even if this money originated in the BVI, it would not have broken any election law.
When we put the details of these arrangements to the institute, it insisted that this contribution was “compliant with all applicable elections rules, and regulations”.
These international manoeuvres are hard to square with the institute’s declaration that a “prosperous nation must be independent and sovereign, free to make its own laws and set its own regulations for the betterment of its citizenry and national interest”. The institute has also given platforms to leading figures in the Brexit campaign, inviting both Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg to give keynote speeches at its summer party.
Perhaps the Prosperity Institute should replace the huge Union Jack it flies from its offices in Mayfair with the flags of the British Virgin Islands, UAE, the Cayman Islands and Malta.
