A former Tory MP claims a government minister pressed her to help advance a party donor seeking a knighthood or peerage, court documents have revealed.
Charlotte Leslie told a colleague that Lord Agnew - then a Cabinet Office minister - insisted she appoint millionaire Mohamed Amersi as chairman of an influential group she led.
Ms Leslie also claims Mr Amersi told her such a role would help him secure an honour, the court documents allege.
Mr Amersi is suing her for defamation.
The documents have been disclosed by the courts for the first time as part of the legal action, which is pitting the two Conservative Party figures against each other.
One is Mr Amersi, a businessman who has donated more than £500,000 to the Conservatives over the past four years. His Russian-born partner donated a further £260,000 to the party between 2017 and 2018.
The other is Ms Leslie, who was MP for Bristol North West from 2010-17. She is managing director of the Conservative Middle East Council (CMEC), which promotes friendship between Tory politicians and the Middle East region.
The court documents show Ms Leslie refused to appoint Mr Amersi to chairman of CMEC in 2020. She wrote to party colleagues and “national security individuals” about her concerns that Mr Amersi was trying to set up a rival organisation, the papers show.
“I have been told the party’s board rejected two previous attempts because it concluded that Mr Amersi’s primary objective is to secure a knighthood or peerage,” she wrote to the CMEC’s honorary president, Sir Nicholas Soames, in December 2020.
“Indeed, Mr Amersi has repeatedly been clear about this motive to me during his long and persistent campaign to impose himself as chairman of CMEC.”
Sir Nicholas - Sir Winston Churchill’s grandson, who stood down as one of the Conservative Party’s longest-standing MPs at the last election after falling out with the leadership over Brexit - forwarded Ms Leslie’s concerns to Ben Elliot, co-chairman of the party.
A few weeks later, Ms Leslie sent another note to Sir Nicholas, alleging a Conservative Party HQ staff member had contacted her, in July 2020. She said it was to discuss the party’s work with special-interest affiliates such as CMEC - often known as Conservative “friends of” groups - and “Mr Amersi’s ambitions”.
“I explained that it would not be appropriate for him to become chairman of CMEC in return for money,” she wrote.
Mr Amersi accuses Ms Leslie of “inaccurately recording” their discussions and publishing a series of documents containing “highly defamatory” allegations to influential individuals.
Through his lawyers, he told the BBC it was “categorically false” that he had acted with the objective of securing an honour or that his proposed organisation had been rejected by the party.
Lord Agnew told BBC News he had never met Mr Amersi in person but the businessman had helped provide key materials needed to manufacture facemasks during the pandemic. “So Ms Leslie was right when I described Mr Amersi as a ‘doer’,” he said. "In my limited dealings with him he definitely had been.
"However, beyond that she is wrong in her assertion that he was a good friend. She is also wrong in suggesting I was irate about anything so far from my area of responsibility.
“I merely suggested that he was in my judgement, given my experience of him, a credible potential candidate as chairman of her organisation. The idea that I demanded she meet him is rubbish. I suggested she meet. I thought she would find it helpful.”
Ms Leslie told BBC News: "The court case relates to confidential memoranda that were sent in good faith to a small number of people who had a legitimate interest in the subject matter, which have become public as a result of this legal action.
“I have no comment other than I am vigorously defending the claim.”
There will be lots of “evidence” put before the court for, it seems, Amersi knows that extending the case will “break” Charlotte Leslie financially if she loses.