Queen Elizabeth II’s solicitor managed offshore wealth for Assad’s uncle
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Version 0 of 1. Exclusive: Mark Bridges of Farrer & Co was trustee for Rifaat al-Assad, who was charged with war crimes in 2024 Queen Elizabeth II’s private solicitor spent eight years helping to manage the offshore wealth of the uncle of the recently deposed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, an investigation has established. Rifaat al-Assad became known as the “butcher of Hama” after allegations he played a key role in a massacre of thousands of Syrians at the city of Hama in 1982. In 2024, Switzerland formally charged him with war crimes. Concerns about Rifaat’s activities, including his record as the head of a feared Syrian paramilitary force known as the Defense Brigades, have been publicly raised in Europe and the US by the media, human rights groups and government officials since the 1980s. He left Syria for Europe in 1984 after a failed coup against his brother. Inquiries by the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism have established that Mark Bridges, also known as the third Baron Bridges, served as a trustee on at least five trusts holding assets in France and Spain on behalf of Rifaat al-Assad or his relatives between 1999 and 2008. During the same period, Bridges also held one of the most prestigious legal positions in Britain: private legal adviser to the British monarch. He was Queen Elizabeth’s solicitor from 2002 to 2019. The findings raise questions about whether it was appropriate for the monarch’s personal lawyer to take the ethical and reputational risk of working for an individual accused of human rights atrocities, in view of potential embarrassment to the queen had the connection been discovered while she was still alive. There is no suggestion of any regulatory wrongdoing by Bridges, who was knighted for his services to the queen in 2019. His firm, Farrer & Co, said the trusts were established on the advice of another leading law firm, that Bridges’s work for Rifaat al-Assad was in complete compliance with regulatory requirements in effect at the time and that Bridges had been presented with evidence contradicting the allegations made against him. Assad’s luxury property empire The property empire amassed by Rifaat al-Assad after his arrival in Europe spanned the most luxurious postcodes of Paris, London and the Costa del Sol. His acquisitions, which he claimed were part-funded by cheques worth millions of dollars from the king of Saudi Arabia, included Witanhurst in London’s Highgate – the second-largest private residence in the capital after Buckingham Palace – and a seven-storey mansion near Paris’s Arc de Triomphe. Assad held his property empire through offshore companies and trusts, obscuring his ownership. One trust was registered in the Bahamas, while some of the purchases used shell companies in Gibraltar, a British overseas territory, before transfer to Spanish and later Maltese companies. In 2014, prosecutors in France began investigating whether Rifaat al-Assad’s wealth had in fact been obtained through corruption. Bridges had ceased acting as a trustee for Rifaat in 2008, his lawyers said, but continued to provide “limited and ad-hoc” legal advice until 2015 “in circumstances whereby the regulatory requirements imposed on the firm were met”. Two of the trusts that Bridges had managed were said to own the Spanish portion of Rifaat al-Assad’s real estate empire, including a deluxe villa with swathes of land near Marbella. In 2019, Spanish prosecutors alleged that these same trusts controlled shell companies holding more than 500 properties in Spain worth €695m (£595m). According to the Spanish prosecutors, the offshore setup was designed to “hide the true ownership of the huge amount of real estate properties” and enabled the “laundering [of] dirty money from abroad”, referring to funds allegedly stolen from the Syrian state. In 2020, a French court convicted Rifaat al-Assad of tax fraud and laundering embezzled public money – primarily about $200m (£151m) stolen from Syrian state funds and $100m in fraudulent loan agreements from Libya. Assad was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment. He fled to Syria in 2021 while his conviction was under appeal. Allegations of atrocities Though not the only trustee serving Assad, Bridges was by far the most eminent. In addition to his services to the queen, he led the private client team at Farrer, an elite law firm with a reputation forged through serving British royals and aristocrats as far back as 1769. There is no evidence Bridges knew or suspected that Rifaat al-Assad’s money was stolen. Assad claimed his wealth came from benefactors, including the Saudi royal family, and in 2018 the Gibraltar supreme court concluded that it had been reasonable for Rifaat’s trustees to believe this story. The question of Rifaat al-Assad’s status as an alleged war criminal, however, is more complicated. In February 1982, armed militias affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood staged an uprising against the Assad regime in the town of Hama, in western Syria. To suppress the uprising, Syria’s then president, Hafez al-Assad, Rifaat’s brother, dispatched the Syrian army and a paramilitary group called the Defense Brigades. An Amnesty International report published in 1983 found that while “it is difficult to establish for certain what happened”, allegations against Syrian regime forces included “collective execution of 70 people outside the municipal hospital” and “cyanide gas containers … alleged to have been brought into the city, connected by rubber pipes to the entrances of buildings believed to house insurgents, and turned on, killing all the buildings’ occupants”. It is estimated that 10,000 to 40,000 people may have been unlawfully tortured and executed. As head of the paramilitaries, Rifaat al-Assad was believed to have taken a leading role in the carnage. In a 1989 book, From Beirut to Jerusalem, the journalist Thomas Friedman described how, after initial skirmishes, “Rifaat’s tactic shifted from trying to ferret out nests of Muslim Brotherhood men to simply bringing whole neighbourhoods down on their heads and burying the Brotherhood and anyone else in the way.” Allegations of atrocities against Rifaat al-Assad were widely known by the point Bridges began working as a trustee for his offshore wealth in 1999. In 2013, Swiss prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into Rifaat al-Assad’s role in suppressing the Hama uprising. In 2021 it issued an international arrest warrant for Assad, and in 2024 he was formally charged with war crimes. Assad has always denied these charges. His whereabouts is unknown ‘Credible information’ Farrer said Assad’s trustees, including Bridges, “were provided with credible information, when they were appointed and at different junctures thereafter, which fundamentally contradicted the claims being made in the media about Mr al-Assad”. The firm added that it and Bridges were restricted by a duty of client confidentiality from revealing what this evidence was, or commenting on whether it was appropriate for the queen’s solicitor to also have represented Assad. However, it did share 11 French defamation judgments, dating from the late 1980s and early 1990s, that found in Assad’s favour. The majority related to allegations made in various news outlets that Rifaat al-Assad’s wealth was sourced from organised crime. In the case of the two judgments that substantially addressed allegations of human rights abuses, the courts found that the journalists had failed to reflect certain nuances of Amnesty International’s report by glossing over uncertainties about whether the Assad regime directly ordered the atrocity. Public attitudes towards British lawyers acting for foreign politicians with questionable reputations have hardened in recent years. This month, a taskforce of senior lawyers and civil society experts said law firms must request more “credible explanations” from their clients as to the source of their wealth, and that it was unsustainable to disregard reputational risks to the legal profession. “Whether the same decision [to act for Assad] would be made today, in the light of further information now available and, arguably, the more stringent demands of the regulatory environment, is a point on which one might speculate,” Farrer said in its response. |