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.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham and Education Secretary and Labour deputy leader Lucy Powell at the Labour Party Conference
Khaldoon Al Mubarak, chairman of Manchester City, during a match against Sunderland at the 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.
Then Mayor of Manchester, Mr Burnham pictured with the Manchester City chairman in 2019
Manchester City lift the Premier League trophy after playing Huddersfield Town in 2018
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.
Manchester City owner Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan at the Champions League Final
Then Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is welcomed by Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak as he arrives in Abu Dhabi
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.
Labour Faces £300,000 Freebies Row as Andy Burnham’s £55 Million Taxpayer Loan Comes Under Scrutiny
Labour is facing renewed questions over political hospitality, financial transparency and the use of public money after reports revealed that Labour politicians received almost £300,000 in gifts and hospitality linked to Manchester City and the United Arab Emirates, while a separate investigation examined approximately £55 million in public loans approved for property companies ultimately controlled by the football club’s Abu Dhabi owner.
The controversy has placed Prime Minister Andy Burnham under particular scrutiny because he chaired meetings of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) in 2017 when loans were approved for three property companies linked to Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan. The loans came from a publicly funded housing investment scheme designed to support development projects across Greater Manchester.
The revelations have prompted questions about transparency, political relationships and the safeguards surrounding public investment. However, the existence of the loans does not by itself establish wrongdoing, and the fact that politicians received hospitality does not automatically demonstrate that any public decision was improperly influenced.
The central issue is whether the arrangements were properly disclosed, whether the loan decisions followed appropriate procedures and whether the public can be confident that taxpayers’ money was administered fairly.
The £55 million loan controversy
According to reporting published in October 2026, companies ultimately controlled by Sheikh Mansour received loans worth approximately £55.7 million through the Greater Manchester Housing Investment Loan Fund while Burnham was mayor of Greater Manchester.
The fund was established to help finance housing developments that might otherwise struggle to secure investment. It was backed by public money and intended to support construction and regeneration across the region.
Three Jersey-registered property companies connected to Abu Dhabi United Group, the investment vehicle associated with Sheikh Mansour, received the loans. Sheikh Mansour is also a member of Abu Dhabi’s royal family and holds senior positions in the United Arab Emirates government.
The decisions were made at GMCA meetings chaired by Burnham in 2017. However, the authority’s collective decision-making structure is important: the loans were not simply personal payments authorised by Burnham acting alone. Questions about the process must therefore examine the decisions, documentation, assessments and responsibilities of the authority as a whole.
The companies involved have been associated with property development in Manchester, where large-scale regeneration projects have transformed parts of the city. Public loan schemes can help bring forward developments by providing finance that commercial lenders may be reluctant to offer on the same terms.
But such schemes also require robust oversight. Public authorities must assess financial risk, ensure that lending decisions are consistent with the fund’s objectives and demonstrate that public money is being used for legitimate purposes.
The loans are now attracting scrutiny over the transparency of the approval process. Reporting on the investigation indicates that councillors want clearer answers about how decisions were reached and how the authority ensured that its procedures were followed. <Cite refs={[“turn359263search1″,”turn359263search3″,”turn359263search4”]}/>
Were the loans repaid?
One important detail is that the loans have reportedly been repaid in full, with interest, according to Manchester Life, the property venture associated with the developments.
That matters when assessing the financial implications for taxpayers. A loan is not the same as a grant or a gift: the recipient is expected to repay the money under agreed conditions. If repayment takes place as required, the public fund can recover its capital and potentially earn interest.
Nevertheless, repayment does not automatically answer every question about the original decision. An investigation can still examine whether the loans were awarded transparently, whether the terms represented appropriate value for money and whether other developers were treated fairly.
The public interest therefore extends beyond whether the money was returned. It includes the criteria used to select borrowers, the assessment of the projects’ financial viability and the safeguards in place to prevent conflicts of interest.
Those are questions that should be answered through documentary evidence and the findings of the relevant scrutiny process, rather than through political allegations alone.
The £300,000 freebies row
The loan controversy has developed alongside separate reporting about gifts, tickets, hospitality and overseas trips received by Labour politicians.
An investigation published in October reported that Labour politicians had received nearly £300,000 in benefits linked to Manchester City and the UAE. The reported benefits included hospitality at sporting events, tickets and trips. The figures were compiled from political declarations and other records, and the total should not be confused with money paid directly to Labour by a single donor. <Cite refs={[“turn359263search0″,”turn359263news8”]}/>
Such benefits are not automatically improper. Political representatives may receive invitations to events or undertake visits for legitimate professional reasons. Parliamentary rules require relevant interests and benefits to be declared, helping the public understand relationships that might otherwise remain hidden.
The important questions are whether the benefits were declared accurately, whether the relevant rules were followed and whether any recipient participated in decisions where a conflict of interest could reasonably arise.
The controversy has become particularly sensitive because Manchester City is owned by a group associated with Abu Dhabi, while the UAE has significant commercial and investment interests in Britain. Those relationships do not establish that a political decision was influenced by hospitality, but they make transparency especially important.
For Labour, the challenge is to demonstrate that its representatives follow the same standards of disclosure and accountability that the party expects from political opponents.
Burnham’s relationship with Manchester City
Burnham’s longstanding connection with Manchester City is another focus of the scrutiny.
Reporting published in October alleged that, while serving as Greater Manchester mayor, Burnham attended two dinners with Manchester City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak at the club’s stadium. The reported hospitality was worth almost £1,200 in total and appeared in an earlier register of interests.
The report raised questions about whether Burnham had previously described the extent of his contact with the club too narrowly. His supporters can point to the fact that public figures routinely meet major employers and investors as part of their official duties. Manchester City is a prominent institution in the region, and its ownership has been involved in substantial property investment.
However, public meetings and private hospitality are not necessarily the same thing. Where a political figure has an official role in decisions involving companies connected to people they meet, the public is entitled to ask whether the relationship was properly declared and whether the decision-making process was sufficiently independent.
The relevant distinction is between a documented connection and proof of improper conduct. The reported dinners and loans warrant scrutiny, but they do not, on their own, demonstrate that Burnham acted improperly or that the hospitality influenced the lending decisions. <Cite refs={[“turn359263news8″,”turn359263search1”]}/>
Why the investigation matters
The GMCA’s housing investment fund was created to help development projects proceed by providing loans from a pool of public money. The wider scheme has lent substantial sums to developers, making oversight essential.
Public lending can support economic growth, create housing and encourage regeneration. Yet it also carries risks. If a borrower fails to repay, the public sector may face losses. If loans are offered on terms that are not properly justified, authorities may struggle to demonstrate that taxpayers received fair value.
A transparent process should establish how applicants were assessed, what security was provided, how interest rates and repayment terms were determined, and whether officials considered competing proposals consistently.
Scrutiny should also consider whether decisions were made collectively and whether the appropriate officers and committee members were involved. Where public officials chair meetings, it is important to distinguish their procedural role from the responsibilities of the wider decision-making body.
The investigation could therefore help clarify how the fund operated and whether changes to its governance are needed. Its value will depend on the evidence examined and whether the findings lead to practical improvements.
Labour faces a wider question of political accountability
The controversy comes at a time when political donations and hospitality have become recurring issues across Westminster. Voters expect public representatives to disclose financial interests and explain relationships that could create actual or perceived conflicts.
Burnham’s own parliamentary register lists financial support and donations connected with his political leadership campaign, including support from longstanding Labour donors. Those declarations illustrate why the register exists: it provides a formal record that journalists, political opponents and members of the public can examine. <Cite refs={[“turn359263search5″,”turn359263search6”]}/>
The existence of a donation or declared benefit is not proof of misconduct. Political parties depend on donations, and elected representatives may receive legitimate support for campaign and parliamentary activities. The essential safeguards are accurate disclosure, compliance with the applicable rules and clear separation between political relationships and official decisions.
For Labour, the current controversy creates a communications challenge as well as a governance question. The party must explain the difference between the reported hospitality, the public loans and the scrutiny process, rather than allowing distinct issues to become one undifferentiated allegation.
It must also recognise that public confidence depends on more than technical compliance. People are more likely to trust public institutions when decisions are explained openly, records are accessible and concerns are answered with evidence.
What about the government’s response?
The reporting on the loan decisions indicates that the GMCA’s scrutiny committee has been examining concerns about the transparency of the process. The authority has said it is supporting the committee’s enquiries. Downing Street did not comment in the reporting cited here. <Cite refs={[“turn359263search3″,”turn359263search4”]}/>
The outcome of that scrutiny will be important. It could establish whether the procedures in place at the time were followed and whether any shortcomings require changes to the way future loans are approved.
A responsible investigation should not begin with an assumption of guilt. It should examine the documentary record, hear from the relevant people and distinguish procedural weaknesses from evidence of deliberate misconduct.
If the process was properly conducted, publishing the evidence could help clear up uncertainty. If problems are identified, the authority should explain what went wrong and what steps will prevent similar issues in future.
The same principle applies to hospitality declarations. Where records are incomplete or descriptions of meetings appear inconsistent, the appropriate response is to clarify the facts and correct any errors where necessary.
Why taxpayers deserve clear answers
For ordinary taxpayers, the central question is straightforward: was public money used in accordance with the rules, and did the public receive an appropriate return?
The reported repayment of the loans with interest is a relevant part of the answer, but it is not the whole answer. Transparency also requires an explanation of the original lending decisions, the risks assessed at the time and the standards applied to all applicants.
Likewise, the reported £300,000 in hospitality and benefits should be assessed through the underlying records. The total relates to reported benefits involving multiple politicians and sources; it should not be interpreted as a single payment to Burnham or as proof that the loans were connected to the hospitality.
Keeping these distinctions clear is essential to a fair assessment. Political controversies can become misleading when different sums, individuals and decisions are combined under one headline without explaining how they relate to one another.
The public has a legitimate interest in examining both matters. But the strongest conclusions will come from verified records and formal findings, not from assumptions based on association.
What happens next?
The scrutiny of the GMCA loans is likely to keep questions about Burnham’s mayoral record and relationships with major investors in the news. The investigation should clarify the approval process and whether the authority needs to strengthen its transparency and oversight arrangements.
Meanwhile, the hospitality controversy places renewed emphasis on declarations of interests and the standards expected of politicians who engage with powerful businesses and overseas institutions.
For Labour, the priority is to provide clear answers and demonstrate that public decisions are made fairly. For the GMCA, it is to show that public lending is governed by transparent procedures and rigorous financial assessment. For Burnham, the questions concern his role in chairing the relevant meetings and the accuracy and completeness of disclosures about his connections with Manchester City.
At present, the available reporting establishes that the loans were approved, that the companies involved were linked to Sheikh Mansour, that hospitality was reported and that scrutiny is under way. It does not establish that Burnham personally acted improperly or that the hospitality influenced the lending decisions.
The final assessment should rest on evidence. If the investigation identifies failures, the public deserves accountability and corrective action. If it finds that the process was properly conducted, its conclusions should be made clear.
Either way, the controversy underlines a basic principle of public life: when public money and political relationships intersect, transparency is not optional. It is essential to maintaining confidence that decisions are being made in the public interest.