Burnham chaired £55m housing loans to Sheikh Mansour firms

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Prime Minister Andy Burnham chaired the Greater Manchester Combined Authority meetings that approved roughly fifty-five point seven million pounds in housing loans to companies ultimately owned by Sheikh Mansour, the Abu Dhabi owner of Manchester City. The loans were repaid with interest. No evidence has emerged of personal payments to Burnham. In 2017, as Greater Manchester mayor, Burnham chaired two GMCA meetings approving the loans from the Greater Manchester Housing Investment Loan Fund to three Jersey-based property companies controlled by Sheikh Mansour.

The money funded apartment schemes under the Manchester Life joint venture with Manchester City Council, delivering 453 homes. Richard Leese, Burnham’s deputy mayor, was recused because he sat on Manchester Life’s board. Manchester Life was set up in 2014 as a council-ADUG joint venture. A 2015 ten-year agreement gave ADUG first refusal on development land across roughly two square miles between the Etihad and the city centre.

That deal expired in 2024. The former Central Retail Park site, bought by the council in 2017 for about forty-two million pounds, is now earmarked for Burnham’s Number 10 North project. Burnham has publicly praised the owners repeatedly. On September 30, after City was found guilty of over a hundred Premier League financial breaches, he told the BBC he would be really concerned to lose them and thanked City Football Group for investing in the city.

One of his first calls as PM was to the UAE president, praising UAE investment in Manchester. The apartment blocks are owned by six Jersey companies — Glass Developments, Loom Cotton, Silk Glass, Flour Developments, Blossom Iron, and Vesta Street — all registered at 47 Esplanade and ultimately owned by Loom Holdings, controlled by Sheikh Mansour. Land went on leases of up to 999 years. The UK company collecting the rent, Manchester Life Management Company, paid just four thousand pounds in corporation tax in 2021 on ten point one million in rental income.

From 2016 to 2021 its cumulative revenue was twenty-six million and it paid under ten thousand in tax.