Tory chairman refuses to name Macedonian business partners

2008 hotel venture links Lord Feldman’s company with Balkan vehicle registered in offshore tax haven, with campaigners calling party chair’s secrecy ‘hypocritical’

The chairman of the Conservative party is facing questions about his former business partners in a controversial joint-venture hotel deal in crisis-stricken Macedonia.

Lord Feldman, a university friend of prime minister David Cameron, is refusing to reveal the identity of his former business associates in the Balkan country, who operate behind a company registered in a secretive offshore tax haven.

Slagjana Taseva, the director of anti-corruption organisation Transparency International in Macedonia, said there were serious concerns about Macedonian politicians and their allies using offshore companies to hold land and other Macedonian assets. “It is hypocritical that British politicians are helping them to keep the identities secret,” Taseva said.

Lord Feldman’s company, Jayroma, entered a partnership in 2008 with Rigo Holding, which is based in the Netherlands Antilles, a Caribbean tax haven.

Campaigners believe that Rigo Holding is controlled by the controversial Macedonian businessman Jordan Kamcev, who owns hotels, farmland and media businesses in his home country. The contact details for the consortium in Macedonia were office buildings owned by Kamcev.

Rigo Holding and Jayroma’s joint company, called HLH Macedonia LLP, intended to build a hotel on government-owned land in the centre of Skopje, the country’s capital, through a Macedonian subsidiary.

According to 2014 Companies House documents, HLH Macedonia LLP continues to be registered at the same address as the Jayroma offices in London. A spokesman for Feldman said the Macedonian subsidiary had been sold in 2010.

Kamcev is close friends with Nikola Gruevski, Macedonia’s prime minister and the country’s former head of intelligence.

Macedonia is currently in a political deadlock, with thousands of people taking to the streets in recent days to protest about a wire-tapping and election-rigging scandal. Gruevski is under pressure to resign after his political opponents claimed the phone calls of 20,000 people – including politicians, journalists and religious leaders – had been tapped.

In 2003, Feldman arranged for Cameron to visit Macedonia on a junket to watch an England football match. The football tickets were paid for by Orka Holdings, one of Kamcev’s companies, and the future prime minister was introduced to Macedonia’s political elite.

Cameron invited Gruevski to visit him at Downing Street in November 2010.

Feldman, who has known the prime minister since the two attended Oxford University together and was put in the House of Lords in 2010, has not declared the interest in HLH Macedonia in the parliamentary register.

The House of Lords rules state that peers must list any “relevant financial interest” which might be thought to influence their parliamentary conduct.

A spokesman for Feldman said that the rules made clear that only personal financial interests must be declared, “not the subsidiaries of those interests”. He also declined to say who was behind Rigo Holding.

Under the coalition government, George Osborne insisted transparency and trust were key to operating businesses in a fair way. “Transparency is an essential element of good corporate governance – it gives investors and others a means to hold companies to account,” ran one government report last year, after Cameron had made transparency of ownership a central theme of the G8 summit in Lough Erne.

The original land purchase for the hotel attracted criticism because the government land was advertised on the basis that the purchaser would develop a five-star hotel in the heart of Skopje.

According to the tender, any bidder was required to operate at least 250 four- or five-star hotels around the world, and also had to have built a hotel in the past.

Very few companies could meet the criteria and nobody bid for the tender. The land was then readvertised in Macedonian newspapers – again to no avail.

The government subsequently entered exclusive negotiations with the joint-venture buyer, although the small company did not fulfil the criteria.

HLH Macedonia was set up in July 2007, just days before the contracts to develop the hotel were signed. Jayroma was originally in partnership with hotel builder Heritage London and Hanover, whose stake was subsequently taken over by Rigo Holding.

Feldman was recently promoted to attend political cabinet and was one of the figures credited for the Tories’ successful election campaign.