Tories accused of deliberately misleading with their peerage for major donor

The Tories have been accused of ‘deliberately misleading’ people with their reasons for giving a peerage to one of their major donors. Ranbir Singh Suri, a millionaire jewellery magnate, had given £300,000 to the Conservatives over the space of ten years before being ennobled by the party last week. However, it is now claimed that the Tories exaggerated his role as a community leader when making him a lord.

In the official documentation for the new peers, Lord Suri is described as “former General Secretary of the Board of British Sikhs”. But according to today’s Independent the organisation has not existed for 20 years and “only involved four or five people” – casting doubts over what role this position played in his elevation to the Lords.

The prominent Sikh organisation Sikh Federation UK have made a statement on the peerage, saying that the Conservatives’ description of Lord Suri as a leading figure in the British Sikh community was “a bare faced lie”.

The statement says:

“He is no leading figure in Britain’s Sikh community and he is not associated with any of the leading Sikh organisations. Many in the Sikh community simply see Lord Suri as a businessman who has donated large sums of money [to the Tories].”

“The Federation has been campaigning for over a decade to see more visible Sikhs in Parliament. On the one hand this move is welcome, but we would prefer each of the main political parties to have Sikhs in the House of Lords who are younger, there on merit and based on what they have to offer rather than those who are seen as ‘cronies’.”

The Secretary General of the Sikh Council UK, the largest Sikh representative body in Britain, said: ““We have not come across this individual before. The first time I heard of him was when his name was mentioned [as a new peer].”

Kulwant Singh Dhesi, president of the British Sikh Council, also said he had not met the new peer. “I’ve never met this person. I can’t even recognise his face,” he said.