ONE of the Conservative party’s biggest corporate donors has been threatened with being forced off the register of British businesses.
Lycamobile, a low-cost telecoms operator, is more than three months late in filing its accounts.
Companies House records show that two British vehicles in the group, Lycamobile UK and WWW Holding Company, were due to file their financial statements by the end of November. They have both been notified in the past fortnight by Companies House that they will be dissolved within three months unless they can show by then why they should not be struck off.
Lycamobile told The Sunday Times: “We are aware of the deadline for submitting our accounts and are working with our auditors to finalise them. They will be submitted to Companies House in good time for their deadline.”
The company was founded in 2006 by the Sri Lanka-born Subaskaran Allirajah. Based in London’s Canary Wharf, it has 12m customers and operates in 18 countries across Europe, North America and Australasia. Allirajah is ranked 514th on The Sunday Times Rich List with a fortune of £180m.
Advertisement
Lycamobile has given more than £750,000 to the Tories since 2011, and Allirajah recently paid £210,000 for a bronze statue of Margaret Thatcher, auctioned at a Tory fundraising dinner.
The company is one of the world’s biggest “mobile virtual network operators” — organisations that lease bandwidth from other phone networks and form partnerships with the telecoms companies in the countries where they operate.