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Weapons makers and private firms donate £13m to get exclusive access to MPs

Revealed: Unregulated MPs’ groups took more than half their funding from private sector – including health and tobacco firms and big tech

By Peter Geoghegan, Tatev Hovhannisyan, Martin Williams and Ben Quinn
Weapons makers and private firms donate £13m to get exclusive access to MPs
The private sector has given £13m to MPs’ All-Party Parliamentary Groups in the past four years | openDemocracy. All rights reserved
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Arms manufacturers and healthcare businesses are among the private firms that have bought access to Parliament through a £13m “back door” lobbying network, openDemocracy can reveal.

British American Tobacco and Big Tech are also among those that have funded so-called All-Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs) – which are largely unregulated and growing in numbers.

Analysis found that more than half of £25m worth of donations given to APPGs since 2018 has come from the private sector, with the groups repeatedly lobbying for causes that benefit their private donors.

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0