Sunak jet donor denies misleading investors

A Conservative donor who has had his global assets frozen has denied misleading investors in a company part-owned by him.

Akhil Tripathi's lawyers have told the High Court that allegations of fraud are mistaken and he has conducted himself honestly.

Mr Tripathi paid £38,500 to fly Rishi Sunak and eight of his aides by private jet to the Scottish and Welsh Conservative Party Conferences in April of last year - the same month as he visited Downing Street.

In addition to meeting Mr Sunak’s travel costs, Mr Tripathi donated more than £100,000 to the Conservative Party between July 2021 and May 2023.

Over the past year, investors have brought a total of five cases against him personally or the company which he co-founded – Signifier Medical Technologies (SMT) – which developed a therapy for snoring.

Court documents from one of the cases refer to a letter written to the company’s board last September by some of SMT’s investors calling for it to conduct a "forensic investigation" into the company’s "financial activities", the sale of shares, and "political donations".

The Labour Party has called on the Conservatives to give a "full and honest account" of what checks were made on Mr Tripathi’s background before accepting his donations.

The SMT investors went to court because they claimed that Mr Tripathi deceived them when they bought shares in the company.

Mr Tripathi is the co-founder of SMT and its largest shareholder.

In one of the cases, investors claim Mr Tripathi had been deceitful when persuading them to buy shares in 2020 from another shareholder.

They allege that this shareholder was at the time married to a close business associate of Mr Tripathi.

In court documents the investors claim they were told by Mr Tripathi that the shares would be available at a discount as the shareholder was going through a "messy divorce".

Soon after the initial share purchase, four payments left her bank account in the space of a week and were paid to a "Mr A.S." (Mr Tripathi’s first and middle name) and a further payment was referenced as "a gift" to "A Tripathi".

In 2021, after the second share purchase, three payments left her account – with the reference "A Tripathi – gift".

They believe they had been misled that she needed money for her divorce as much of this money from the share sale had in fact been "gifted" to Mr Tripathi.

They allege that therefore the beneficial owner of the shares was really Mr Tripathi himself.

This matters because lawyers for the investors have argued they would not have purchased the shares if they had suspected that Mr Tripathi had been "divesting" from the company he founded.

According to court documents, the investors’ lawyers argued that "there is no obvious innocent explanation why Mr Tripathi received the sale proceeds" from the shares.

The barrister for the investors suggested to the court that some of the proceeds had been spent on "chartering yachts and all sorts of jollifications".

In March, the High Court froze just over £14m worth of Mr Tripathi’s personal assets – including a townhouse in Belgravia.

In freezing his assets, the High Court judge said he found that the investors had "an arguable case that the share sale agreements were induced by Mr Tripathi’s fraudulent misrepresentations".

Mr Tripathi has denied this.

In a defence filed with the court this week in response to the investors’ claims, Mr Tripathi denied that he was divesting. He said he had loaned the company $5m (£4m) since January last year and "remained fully committed" to SMT.

Mr Tripathi also denied he was the beneficial owner of the shares that had been sold.

In his defence, lawyers for Mr Tripathi said his "genuine belief" was that the "personal circumstances" of the seller had motivated the sale.

The money given to him as "gifts" following the sale of the shares had in fact been held on trust, the lawyers said, and he had been given the power to invest the money on behalf of the seller.

The seller later agreed that the funds transferred to him would be treated as an unsecured loan, and that Mr Tripathi could therefore use it for his own purposes, his lawyers added.

Mr Tripathi also claims that the investors have brought the case in order to “wrest control” of the company’s intellectual property.

The BBC understands that the investors have not yet served the seller with court papers and she is therefore yet to file a defence and respond to their allegations.

Asked about whether due diligence had been conducted before accepting donations from Mr Tripathi, the Conservative Party told the BBC: "Donations to the Conservative Party are properly and transparently declared to the Electoral Commission, openly published by them, and comply fully with the law."