Carmen Williams

Sagal Abdi-Wali has just filed her first register of interest in Parliament, revealing who funded her election campaign in the Holborn & St Pancras by-election where she defeated Zack Polanski. And they stink. They are from sources with strong historical ties to Labour Together. And through one of her key donors, Sagal is linked to investments in companies like Palantir and Elbit Systems and Boeing. There is something completely broken about how the reporting regime for donations works that we're only finding this out now, after the election. The returns show that Abdi-Wali had two big donors: Daniel Luhde-Thompson and his wife Cressida Pollock who donated jointly, and Green Britain Group Ltd, the holding company of Dale Vince's Ecotricity. Both donated £50k to the campaign. Daniel Luhde-Thompson is mega-wealthy. He is one of the co-founders of the quant-trading hedge fund Quadrature Capital. Quadrature, whose holding company is registered in the Caymans, donated £4m to the Labour Party during the 2024 General Election. It was the single largest donation Labour had ever received. But nobody knew this fact during the election itself, as the donation was only declared after the election as it was made in a specific week-long window that was exempt from immediate reporting. As I revealed in OpenDemocracy in October 2024, Quadrature had held shares in companies connected to the genocide in Gaza in late 2023 and early 2024. It held an average of $121m in shares in companies linked to the genocide in Gaza between December 2023 and July 2024. This included shareholdings in arms companies like the lead contractor on the F-35, Lockheed Martin. I've just checked Quadrature's most recent SEC filings submitted at the end of June 2026. They show that Quadrature still has investments in arms companies like Boeing and Lockheed. The June fillings show it held $9m in Elbit shares and an astonishing $117m in Palantir. What is it with the Labour Party and connections to Palantir? Luhde-Thompson also donated to Labour Together. He donated £50k at the end of November 2023: smack-bang in the middle of the period when Labour Together hired APCO to investigate journalists (including me and my family) who had exposed Morgan McSweeney's failure to report donations in violation of the law between 2018 and 2020 (of course there is no indication Luhde-Thompson knew about this). Dale Vince, Sagal's other donor, was also a big donor to Labour Together. He has, most recently, strongly supported approving drilling at Jackdaw and Rosebank oilfields. We found out about Dale Vince donating to Sagal during the campaign because it was leaked to the Independent. But voters in Holborn & St Pancras had no idea that she was also being funded by Daniel Luhde-Thompson, linking her to Quadrature and, through that, investments in companies complicit in genocide. There is really something deeply wrong here. Voters were deprived of key information before they cast their vote. Our electoral laws around donations, which allow the mega-rich to dominate our politics, have to be reformed.