Queen Elizabeth’s solicitor managed Syrian war crimes suspect’s wealth

Lord Bridges managed trusts on behalf of the uncle of the former president of Syria – known as ‘the Butcher of Hama’ – while working as the Queen’s private solicitor.

Rifaat al-Assad led Syrian forces that were accused of killing tens of thousands of civilians in 1982. Picture: AP

The private solicitor to the late Queen was also managing the wealth of an alleged Syrian war criminal known as “the Butcher of Hama”.

Lord Bridges, who was knighted in 2019 for his services to the Queen, was a legal adviser to Rifaat al-Assad, an uncle of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. He was Elizabeth II’s lawyer from 2002 to 2019 and a trustee of financial trusts holding assets on behalf of Assad or his relatives, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has reported.

Rifaat al-Assad, now 87, was a vice-president the head of an elite Syrian force accused of massacring up to 40,000 civilians when it put down an insurrection in the city of Hama in 1982. He was exiled after leading a coup attempt in 1984 and invested a fortune in Britain, France and Spain.

Bashar al-Assad, 59, and his British wife, Asma, 49, fled to Moscow when his regime collapsed in December last year. Picture: Dominique Faget/AFP

Bridges’s prestigious London law firm, Farrer & Co, said that his work for Assad had been in compliance with regulatory requirements and that he had received “credible information” contradicting the war crimes allegations. Bridges, 70, acted as a trustee for Assad between 1999 and 2008 and continued providing “ad hoc and limited” legal advice until 2015.

The Crown Prosecution Service started to freeze Assad’s British assets in 2017. It got a court order that prevented him from selling a £4.7 million home in Mayfair, central London, but was too late to stop the £3.72 million sale of a seven-bedroom home in Leatherhead, Surrey. A £16 million (AU$33.2m) townhouse in Mayfair had already been sold. A ruling by a Gibraltar court in 2018 noted that Bridges had been a trustee of two financial trusts associated with Assad, called the English Palomino Trust and the Oryx Trust.

Posters of Rifaat al-Assad in Tripoli in 2007. Picture: Ramzi Haidar/AFP via Getty Images

The court said it was satisfied that Bridges had believed that funding for a project by a third trust, the Europort Trust, set up by Assad in 2000, had been provided by the King of Saudi Arabia and not as a result of criminal activities.

Assad was convicted in France in 2020 of embezzling Syrian state funds to buy homes and offices to build a French property portfolio worth £80 million. Bashar al-Assad, 59, and his British wife, Asma, 49, fled to Moscow when his regime collapsed in December last year.

Farrer & Co told the Bureau of Investigative Journalism: “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.”

The firm was asked for comment.

The Times