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British peer Lord Ashcroft concealed his involvement in a Turks and Caicos Islands construction company that went into receivership with debts of around US$30 million, Panorama, a BBC television programme, has alleged.

Lord Ashcroft. Photo: Anglia Ruskin University

The programme alleges that Ashcroft misled the stock market and the media about his links to Johnston International Limited.

According to the BBC, he said he has had no "economic beneficial or legal interest" in the firm since he sold it in 1999. But the programme has reportedly obtained evidence that shows Ashcroft continued to secretly control the company long after that date.

Johnston was one of the largest construction companies in the Caribbean, until it closed down in June 2010.

Panorama has spoken to 14 former employees, who all say they were told, long after 1999, that Ashcroft was their boss, the BBC reported. The programme also obtained dozens of faxes covering a seven year period that were sent to Ashcroft by the Johnston chief executive after the 1999 sale.

The faxes apparently updated Ashcroft on company business and asked for his instructions on major building projects. Ashcroft then wrote his instructions on some of the faxes and sent them back, Panorama reported.

According to Ashcroft’s lawyers, he did not have any kind of interest in the ownership of the Johnston group of companies.

However, Panorama had not asked Ashcroft about the ownership of Johnston. The programme had asked whether he controlled the company -- and that, the BBC said, is a question he has repeatedly avoided answering.

Johnston had been doing business in the Turks and Caicos Islands since the early 1980s and, with associated operations in the Cayman Islands, Belize, Trinidad and Barbados, was a pre-eminent local and regional contractor.

After 28 years of doing business in the Turks and Caicos, the company was placed into receivership in July 2010 and into liquidation the following month.

At a meeting of Johnston creditors in September 2010, the liquidators revealed that the company’s financial woes may not have occurred had it not been for the non-payment of millions of dollars owed to it by the Urban Development Corporation of Trinidad and Tobago Limited (UDeCOTT).

Further, the list of unpaid debts owed by Turks and Caicos businesses and individuals to Johnston reads like a who’s who of the Progressive National Party (PNP) hierarchy, the governing party in the TCI immediately prior to the partial suspension of the constitution and the imposition of direct rule by Britain following a Commission of Inquiry into allegations of widespread government corruption.

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