Labor MPs defend acceptance of tens of thousands from little-known company | the work

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Labor MPs have defended taking money from a little-known company that has emerged as one of Westminster’s biggest political donors.

Wes Streeting, Dan Jarvis and Yvette Cooper said they did nothing wrong by accepting tens of thousands of pounds from MPM Connect, which is part-owned by Peter Hearn, a benefactor of the business, but has no clear line of business.

MPM Connect was revealed by Sky News and Tortoise on Monday to be one of two almost unknown companies that have donated large sums of money to MPs in recent years. The other is IX Wireless, which has donated more than £100,000 to Conservative MPs since 2019.

The three Labor MPs issued similarly worded statements on Monday in defense of the donations, noting that they had been reported to parliamentary authorities. Jarvis and Streeting called MPM Connect a “recruitment investment firm” — even though the company does not have a website and has not responded to media inquiries about its investments.

MPM did not respond to requests for comment. Lincoln Brown, an accounting firm that shares the same registered address, declined to comment.

MPM is registered at the address of its accountants, Jarvis and Cooper said. However, when Sky News visited this address, someone there claimed not to have heard of the company.

IX Wireless has also come under the spotlight for donating more than £138,000 to 24 Conservative Party members since 2019.

The company builds communications infrastructure such as mobile phone towers and is registered in Blackburn. It is controlled by another company known as Cohiba Communications, for which fellow conservative James Wharton works.

The company has been involved in local disputes in the past over its projects, including in Hyndburn, Lancashire, where a committee of residents protested its “unnecessary” plans to build masts in the town.

The company has focused its donations on a group of Northern Conservative MPs, many of whom are in constituencies close to where it builds its networks.

Christian Wakeford, the Bury South MP who defected to Labor last year, told Tortoise that he had asked Jake Perry, the Conservative Party chairman at the time, to write a motion accepting funding from IX Wireless. The money came in a month later, he said, even though he had never heard of the company.

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“The first thing I heard about IX Wireless was when I was told, ‘This is something you need to put on the Register of Interest for compliance purposes’ — that was all I heard about them,” Wakeford said.

Neither IX Wireless nor Berry responded to requests for comment.

Richard Murphy, a political activist and economist, said: “There is no reason we should let this degree of opacity cloud something that should require full transparency. The answer to this is: Don’t let corporate donations happen.”

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