Wealthy MP With Slave Trade Links Failed To Publish Accounts For Four Of His Firms

A multimillionaire MP who enjoys a Downton Abbey lifestyle funded by historical family links to the slave trade has failed to publish accounts for four of his five companies since 2009, in potential breach of company law.

The Observer and Sunday Mirror revealed in December that Richard Drax was worth an estimated £150m, but had not declared ownership of a Barbados sugar plantation in his register of members’ interests declaration.

Now Drax, the Conservative MP for South Dorset, is having to produce more than a decade’s worth of missing accounts, which reveal hundreds of thousands of pounds of business transactions.

Four months ago we revealed that Drax’s interests declaration was littered with omissions and errors. He had not declared inheriting his family’s 621-acre sugar plantation in Barbados, where from 1640 to 1838 his family used slaves to make huge profits in terrible conditions. Drax told us he had not declared the plantation as it was still in probate after his father died in 2017. Read more…..