The Liberal Democrat party has an interesting and generous benefactor. Over the last six years Swedish billionaire, Frederick Paulsen, has donated £1.43 million to the party through the UK subsidiary, Ferring Pharmaceuticals Ltd, of his Swiss-based company, Ferring.
The chairman of Ferring has been particularly generous in the run-up to this week’s election. As first disclosed in the Sunday Times, Paulsen gave the Lib Dems another £100,000 on November 22 to help fight its campaign.
According to the Electoral Commission, this brings Ferring’s total donations to the party to £1.43m since 2013. Paulsen is also a director of Philip Morris, the tobacco giant, and chairman of Schlumberger AG, the Austrian producer of champagne, wines and liquor.
The 69-year-old Swede has said in the past that he donates to the Lib Dem party because of its pro-European stance, and has over the last few years given the party several hundreds of thousands a pounds a year.
Shortly before the Leave referendum in 2016, Ferring paid £30,000 to Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister, in return for delivering a speech and taking part in a roundtable debate in Geneva.
However, there is growing disquiet over his latest donation because of the coincidence that Ferring is also one of the world’s leading makers of the puberty-blocking drug, triptorelin, and the Lib Dems have adopted a controversial policy on gender identity. The drug is widely used to block puberty among adolescents.
Jo Swinson, the Lib Dem leader, wants to make it easier for people to legally change gender and plan to change the Gender Recognition Act to automatically recognise non-binary gender identities, allowing people to self-identify without medical evidence.
The Lib Dem leader caused an outcry from both feminists and scientists when she queried whether there was such a state as biologically determined sex. In a Radio 4 interview this week, Swinson said: “I am not going to pretend I’m an expert on the subject but I don’t think things are as binary as they are often presented.”
While Swinson accepted most people’s biological sex was determined at birth, she said this was not always the case. The party has also pledged to “introduce an ‘X’ gender option on passports and to extend equality law to cover gender identity and expression.” It also wants to “require schools to introduce gender-neutral uniform policies and break down outdated perceptions of gender appropriateness of certain subjects.”
But critics of the Lib Dem policy fear that if such reforms were to be adopted, it would make it too easy for confused adolescents to start medical hormone treatments during puberty, a time of ambiguity for many teenagers.
They fear that if allowed to self-identify at such a young age without medical advice, many teenagers would start treatments which later they would come to regret.
News of Ferring’s donation has also raised eyebrows among many medics who worry about the close relationship between the company and the party. One said: “No one is suggesting that Ferring is behind influencing Lib Dem policy. However, it is a rather bizarre coincidence that one of the most widely used drugs for teenagers undergoing hormone treatment is made by Ferring.”
Ferring, which is controlled from Curacao, a Caribbean tax haven, has grown rapidly over the last two decades into a significant player in pharmaceuticals and a pioneer in developing products based upon natural, pituitary-produced peptide hormones.
Based in Saint-Prez, Switzerland, Ferring employs 6,500 people around the world. Its UK arm is in West Drayton.
Mr Paulsen inherited the company from his father, a refugee from Nazi Germany, who founded his first laboratory in Malmo, Sweden. Although still chairman, Mr Paulsen now concentrates on philanthropic projects including the funding of fertility clinics in Russian cities in an attempt to reverse the country’s population decline.
He’s made something of a reputation for himself as a polar explorer, making several expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctica using Russian technology and expertise. Paulsen is an honorary Russian consul in Lausanne, and was presented with the Russian Order of Friendship by President Vladimir Putin.
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