Labour politicians received £300,000 freebies from Manchester City and the United Arab Emirates while Andy Burnham oversaw £55m taxpayer loan to the Arab state

DAILYMAIL.COM • 7h ago

By LIZ IVENS 12:55 10 Oct 2026, updated 13:03 10 Oct 2026

Labour politicians have received nearly £300,000 of freebies from Manchester City and the United Arab Emirates while the PM personally oversaw a £55million taxpayer loan to the Arab state.

It has emerged that thousands of pounds in free tickets, hospitality and foreign trips were given to the party’s MPs – including VIP seats for the PM’s right hand woman, Labour deputy leader Lucy Powell, according to the MPs Register of Interests.

Meanwhile the granting of the huge loan – which was meant to finance key property projects which would otherwise struggle – is the first piece of evidence that Andy Burnham, then Mayor of Manchester, was directly involved in pro-UAE decisions.

The latest revelations come after Mr Burnham appeared to back Man City’s UAE owners after the club was found guilty of massive financial fraud.

He said he would be ‘really concerned’ to lose Sheikh Mansour’s City Football Group, thanking them for the ‘money that they didn’t just put into the Etihad and the campus around it but also into the city’.

But after a row erupted over his comments, red-faced Downing Street officials insisted no club was ‘above the rules’.

In total, Labour MPs have received £273,396 worth of handouts from the UAE – more than all other political parties combined – including executive boxes at the football and luxury flights.

Over half of the VIP football tickets went to MPs with a Manchester connection including long-term Burnham ally Ms Powell, MP for Manchester Central, which covers the Man City Etihad stadium.

Over an 11-month period she was given freebie tickets to five matches worth £2,360 including one £849 VIP ticket to watch Man City take on Newcastle in March 2024.

Now a minister at the Department for Work and Pensions, Andrew Western, Labour MP for Stretford and Urmston, accepted handouts for four matches, including two VIP hospitality tickets for the Community Shield at Wembley in August 2024 worth £880.

Manchester Withington MP Jeff Smith also snaffled VIP tickets to Man City including a ticket to the local derby FA Cup final against Man Utd worth £1,798.

Former PM Sir Keir Starmer, previously under fire for accepting over £100k in handouts, also accepted a UAE freebie – a £900 ticket to watch his beloved team Arsenal play Man City in March 2024.

An investigation by The Sun looking at the MPs’ Register of Interests found that the Arab state’s government ministries, royal offices and state-funded bodies have spent more than £467,000 funding UK politicians – around £3,000 a month – since 2012.

Labour had 28 entries for 25 MPs while the Tories had 43 entries for 38 MPs, worth £174,133. The SNP, Liberal Democrats and Reform also received handouts from the UAE, of £15,000, £3,500 and £1,000 respectively.

The donors included the UAE’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Government of the UAE, the Abu Dhabi Education Council and the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi.

Between October 2014 and May 2025, Man City handouts – worth more than £25,000 – were given to politicians from all parties.

Man City deny wrongdoing and are appealing against the guilty verdict. Meanwhile the UAE has threatened to pull out of major UK investment projects including the Oxford-Cambridge planned tech corridor, the UK’s answer to Silicon Valley, in retaliation at the guilty verdict.

Mr Burnham has also been left with questions to answer after it emerged he chaired meetings which approved £55million in funding for the Manchester City owner’s property companies while Manchester mayor.

The huge sum was filtered to three Jersey-based property companies under the ultimate control of Sheikh Mansour’s investment vehicle, Abu Dhabi United Group (ADUG).

One of the world’s wealthiest men, Sheikh Mansour is also a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family and vice president and deputy prime minister of the UAE.

Mr Burnham chaired the two crucial meetings in 2017 when the funding was approved from monies from the Greater Manchester Housing Investment Loan Fund (GMHILF).

The £300million fund is a pot of taxpayers’ money lent to the region by central government which was supposed to be lent to private developers to ‘kickstart housing projects that would otherwise be difficult to fund from elsewhere’, according to a Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) press release in which Mr Burnham was quoted.

All three loans went to companies that were ultimately owned by ADUG.

Two of the loans, totalling more than £30million, went to New Little Mill Developments Ltd and Vesta Street Developments Ltd.

Subsequent filings show that the ultimate beneficiary of the Jersey-based companies was Sheikh Mansour.

According to University of Sheffield research on Manchester city council’s joint venture with ADUG, ADUG was also the ultimate beneficiary of the third company, Lampwick Developments Ltd, at the time the GMCA approved a loan to it of £24.5million.

The money to Lampwick was apparently earmarked for building 213 apartments on privately owned land that already had planning permission.

Council documents claim that in addition to the Lampwick apartments, the loans would be used to create 68 apartments at New Little Mill, and 169 apartments and three townhouses at Vesta Street, New Islington.

All three schemes were ‘brought forward by Manchester Life’, according to a city council document. Manchester Life is a joint venture between the city council and ADUG.

But with Sheikh Mansour’s wealth estimated at £23billion, commentators are demanding to know why a sizeable chunk of the fund was ever lent to him in the first place.

And questions have been asked about why it happened on the PM’s watch.

Until now, it was not clear that Sheikh Mansour’s contribution to the city, which the PM has repeatedly praised, was partly financed by loans from taxpayers’ money.

It will be a fresh headache for the PM after his allies have repeatedly sought to distance him personally from decisions favouring the UAE.

Louie French, the shadow sports minister, said: ‘We need to know why these firms got loans from a fund intended for housing projects that would not otherwise be viable.’

Mr French told today’s Telegraph that they could ‘easily have got competitively priced loans on the private market’ so questioned ‘why did the taxpayer have to finance them instead, thanks to approval at meetings chaired by Burnham when he was mayor’?

Calling the PM’s intervention in the Man City case ‘completely extraordinary and totally out of touch’, he said: ‘But now it is beginning to make sense. The Prime Minister needs to come clean: why did he let these loans proceed?’

And the Liberal Democrat chairman of the GMCA overview and scrutiny committee John Leech said the loans appeared out of kilter with the ‘stated aim’ of the funds, and that the committee would look into ‘this issue of public loans for housing schemes in Greater Manchester’.

‘Clearly, there would be no suggestion that the money couldn’t come from somewhere else in the case of Sheikh Mansour,’ he added.

ADUG has repaid the loans with interest. The rate of interest is not known.

Speaking after the fund’s launch in 2015, Bill Enevoldson, GMCA’s chief investment officer, said it was ‘not designed to finance unviable projects but can unlock currently unfundable ones…’.

The GMCA must return at least 80 per cent of the pot to central government by April 2028. The pot has been lent more than three times over, delivering 11,000 new homes.

An ‘evaluation report’ commissioned by GMCA suggests that developers have been attracted to the fund’s favourable terms rather than borrowing from it ‘out of necessity’.

The terms of the GMHILF loans to the three Abu Dhabi-backed companies have not been made public.

Defending ADUG, a Manchester Life spokesman said it had to put its own capital into projects before accessing loans from GMHILF.

They said: ‘The £55.7m represented the external debt financing for the three relevant developments. It did not form part of the private-sector equity investment in Manchester Life. Presenting them as though they constituted the investment in Manchester Life materially overstates their role.’

Lampwick has since been sold to a US investor, although the properties are still marketed by Manchester Life.

The Lampwick Developments Ltd which was awarded the loan is unrelated to the UK-based company of the same name.

It was also revealed last week that Manchester City Council paid over the odds for a dilapidated retail park that it intended to reserve for development by Abu Dhabi.

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