RUTH Davidson has not yet had dinner with the stupendously wealthy Russian who won her at auction.
At the Tory party’s Black and White Ball in 2018, Lubov Chernukhin paid £20,000 for a lunch with the party’s former Scottish leader.
Chernukhin, the wife of Vladimir Putin’s one-time deputy finance minister, is the largest female Tory donor in British political history.
She’s previously bid high at the party’s auctions, winning a tennis game with Boris Johnson for £45,000, paying £30,000 for a private meal with Education Secretary Gavin Williamson in the Churchill War Rooms off Westminster and splashing out £135,000 for a night out with Theresa May.
Electoral Commission records show that she had donated more than £335,000 to the Conservative Party in the first seven months of this year. In the 12 months since July 2019 her contributions to Tory funds reached almost £560,000. Since her first donation back in 2012, the party has taken £1,765,804 from her.
The Tories say that as Chernukhin has lived in the UK since 2003 and has British citizenship, all her political donations are legal.
READ MORE: Russia report: What it says about Scotland's independence referendum
According to papers filed with Companies House, Chernukhin’s occupation is an investment director.
Though she has been listed as a director of a number of companies, she is presently only the director of Capital Construction and Development. Accounts show that last year the firm reported debts of £8m.
Lubov’s husband, Vladimir Chernukhin, is a former state banker and deputy finance minister who left Moscow abruptly in 2004 after falling out with Putin.
He has been involved in a long-running court dispute with the oligarch Oleg Deripaska over the ownership of a former industrial site in central Moscow.
Earlier this week it emerged Deripaska – who is said to be on good terms with the Kremlin – called for the UK Government to use an unexplained wealth order to probe Lubov Chernukin’s fortune.
It emerged in court he had commissioned a private investigation into the couples’ finances and wanted to send the findings to the National Crime Agency.
At the High Court in November 2018, the judge ruled in favour of Chernukhin over the property dispute but criticised his evidence.
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