Tory MP paid £300,000 by private equity firm that invests in spy tech for China
A Tory MP has been paid £300,000 by a private equity firm that invests in a spy technology company used by the China government against Uyghur Muslims.
North East Bedfordshire MP Richard Fuller has been paid £20,000 a month since January 2020 to work as an advisory director for Investcorp Securities.
It is one of four jobs that he has outside of parliament.
The Sunday Mirror reported today that Investcorp bankrolled a Hong Kong firm that has been contracted by Xi Jinping’s government to track the country’s oppressed Uyghur Muslim minority.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) firm SenseTime claims that its technology can monitor and identify Uyghur Muslims using facial recognition.
In a 2019 patent for its AI technology, SenseTime said “it is possible to divide the ethnicities … according to Han, non-Han and unknown, or according to Han, Uyghur, non-Han, non-Uyghur, and unknown”.
Despite his position, Fuller was previously a part of a Westminster committee that called for sanctions on UK firms that used supply chains linked to Xinjiang.
Beijing has carried out a sustained ethnic cleansing campaign against the Muslim minority in the country’s northern province of Xinjiang.
An estimated 1m Uyghurs are in detention camps, while there have also been widespread reports of forced sterilisation of women and destruction of mosques.
Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner told the Mirror: “The corruption scandal that has engulfed the Conservative Party gets worse by the day. We need an investigation to get to the bottom of whether this relationship has put our national security at risk and whether this technology has aided human rights abuses in China.”
Fuller declined to comment.