email rounding up the latestNadhim Zahawi, chair of the UK Conservative party, is due to publish his memoirs later this year. The title,, reflects a career that has taken him from the dusty oilfields of Iraqi Kurdistan to the upper echelons of British politics.Zahawi is the focus of the first big scandal to engulf the young premiership of Rishi Sunak after revelations about a clash with the taxman that have left him struggling to hold on to his job.
Born in Baghdad, he has gone from working for disgraced peer Jeffrey Archer to acting as a fixer for oil companies in the notoriously murky world of post-Saddam Iraq. In 2000, he co-founded YouGov, the polling group, which would earn his family millions. Zahawi was born in 1967 into an influential Kurdish family. One grandfather had been governor of the central bank, his signature appearing on Iraq’s banknotes.
It was while campaigning for Kurdish victims of the Hussein regime that he met Archer, then a prominent Tory politician, who raved about the young man’s administrative skills. A 42.5 per cent founder’s stake in the group went to Balshore, a Gibraltar-registered entity controlled by his father. By 2018, that shareholding had been sold off by Balshore for £27mn, disposals that are thought to have led to Zahawi’s settlement with HMRC last summer.
In 2013, Zahawi was criticised by his political foes when it emerged that he had claimed £5,822 in expenses for heating the stables with taxpayer money. This was an innocent error, he said at the time: “I am mortified by this mistake.” It was then that he first met his friend Boris Johnson who, as editor of The Spectator, had commissioned a YouGov poll of Baghdad residents about the US invasion.
“With rumours of 45bn barrels of reserves, everybody wanted a piece of the cake, and companies were fighting hard,” said Alan Mohtadi, who heads T&S Consulting Energy and Security, which advises companies in the Kurdish oil and gas sector. Although Zahawi was an “opportunist”, in the words of one oil consultant, there is no suggestion that he acted improperly in Iraq, an oil-rich country blighted by endemic corruption, including in its energy sector.
By July 2015, he had landed a lucrative role as chief strategy officer at Gulf Keystone, which operated the Shaikan oilfield, one of the Kurdistan region’s largest. “Zahawi’s influence managed to push them to the head of the queue,” said one consultant working on similar projects at the same time. “[Some] rival oil companies felt the Kurdistan Regional Government was playing favourites.”
Zahawi became UK junior education minister in January 2018. However, his rise to the ministerial ranks was almost derailed just days after when it emerged that he had attended a Presidents Club charity dinner exposed by the Financial Times as the scene of sexual harassment. Greensill provided £400mn of credit to entities linked to GFG Alliance, the conglomerate owned by steel tycoon Sanjeev Gupta, after the loans were backed by the government as part of its Covid support measures for the economy.
By the time the FT exposed Gupta’s lavish praise of Zahawi, the major government inquiries into the collapse of Greensill Capital had come and gone. Zahawi’s position had always been that Balshore, his father’s company, owned the 42.5 per cent stake in YouGov, and that neither he nor his wife or children were beneficiaries.