Tory former minister’s trips including campaign for hard Brexit in US funded by donations to thinktank

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Unknown donors have funded nearly £39,000 of trips by the former cabinet minister Owen Paterson by routing the funds through his personal thinktank.

The thinktank, which is called UK 2020, has been used to pay for 10 trips by the former environment secretary, including a visit to the US in November to campaign for a hard Brexit. He set up the thinktank in 2014 after leaving the cabinet.

MPs are required to declare the source of funds for any overseas visit worth more than £300. However, his thinktank, as a private company, is not required to identify its donors. By citing his thinktank as the source of funds, Paterson has effectively avoided revealing who actually financed them.

Paterson says he has declared all required information in his register of interests. However, his failure to name the donors may contravene parliamentary rules, which require members to act with integrity, accountability and openness. They also advise MPs to declare any interests that do not technically fall within the rules, but could be interpreted as influencing their actions.

The MP for North Shropshire is a leading pro-Brexit campaigner who has argued for the UK to leave the EU without a deal. In 2012, he was controversially appointed environment secretary by David Cameron while holding questionable views on climate science. He is currently UK 2020’s sole director as well as its chairman.

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Paterson, a long-term advocate of GM, has used at least three of the UK 2020-funded trips to promote GM technology.

In February 2015 he took a week-long trip to Australia worth £6,381, which he described in the register of members’ interests as a “fact-finding visit, meeting with the PM [Australian prime minister Tony Abbott], senior politicians and opinion formers”. During the trip he visited a site growing genetically modified oilseed crops.

One week later, he took a trip to South Africa worth £3,901, which he described in the register as a “fact-finding visit on GM and combating illegal wildlife crime”. During the trip he gave a speech to a conference on GM food, attacking the European Union and Greenpeace for failing to endorse GM technology.

In September 2015 he took a trip worth £2,891 to New York, where he delivered another speech attacking critics of GM.

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In 2016, Paterson refused to respond to queries from BuzzFeed News about who funded the overseas trips.

The Guardian has since identified two of the thinktank’s donors. Old entries on UK 2020’s website reveal it has previously received sponsorship from the Crop Protection Association (CPA), which represents the agrochemical and GM sector, to host talks at the Conservative party’s annual conferences in 2015 and 2016.

The CPA said it had never donated to UK 2020 to fund Paterson’s overseas trips.

Another UK 2020 donor is the private forensic testing firm, Randox, which makes regular payments of £8,333 a month to Paterson as a consultant. Randox sponsored a UK 2020 report comparing international health outcomes and claiming that the UK’s National Health Service delivered markedly worse outcomes than other countries.

UK 2020 is based at an address in Tufton Street in Westminster shared with several other thinktanks lobbying for a hard Brexit, free market policies and shrinking the state, and promoting climate science denial.

In a brief statement, Paterson said: “All the expenses incurred on these trips have been declared according to parliamentary rules.”

The parliamentary commissioner for standards, Kathryn Stone, who polices the register of MPs’ interests, declined to respond to questions about Paterson’s interests or whether he had sought advice about his arrangement with UK 2020.