Deripaska and Cashcroft: a tale of two billionaires

Good news and bad for billionaire businessmen friends of the Conservative party. Good for Oleg Deripaska, the Russian aluminium magnate who became embroiled in the notorious George Osborne-Nat Rothschild-Peter Mandelson fundraising social snafu while on holiday in Corfu in 2008. He has finally been granted a visa to enter the US after being blocked by the State Department over concerns about his alleged ties to organised crime.

Bad for Lord (Michael) Ashcroft, the Conservative peer long nicknamed 'Lord Cashcroft', who has been snared in a legal and political storm in the Central American haven of Belize, where his Bank of Belize and many of his businesses are based.

In an interview with the Independent, Belize Prime Minister Dean Barrow accused the Tory party deputy chairman and chief fundraiser of monopoly practices relating to the Central American nations' telecom service and of trying to obscure his interests through a complex web of subsidiaries and trusts.

Barrow has promised to unpick a series of commercial deals that he says Ashcroft has used to "soak" the country in the manner of a colonial overlord.

"This sense of Lord Ashcroft's, that he can pretty much call all the shots, and that national governments must simply allow him to have his way – that's colonialism," said Barrow. "I first met him in the 80s when he said he was interested in helping Belize. We actually - silly us - thought he was talking about being philanthropic more than anything else. But he was certainly not a knight in shining armour."

Barrow had a stark warning for David Cameron heading into the election campaign: "You would think that government in the UK is so powerful and so diverse that he could not exercise the kind of influence he has been able to here. But there must be a warning in this: if he can he will. Based on my experience, he fully expects that he who pays the piper plays the tune."

Lord Ashcroft says the accusations are politically motivated. But it's not the first time he's been linked to questionable business practices this year. In February, he was named during hearings into government corruption on Turks and Caicos - where he is a citizen - that led to the suspension of the government.

The commission, led by Sir Robin Auld, heard how Ashcroft, through his former Caribbean construction firm Johnston and Johnston, was allegedly connected to prime beachfront land on which former Premier Michael Misick built an imposing, Miami Beach-style mansion.

The lifting of the US travel ban on Oleg Deripaska, meanwhile, comes after several FBI probes into his business dealings. After granting a visa in 2005 to allow him in, the State Department revoked it a year later when officials raised questions about the truthfulness of his statements during the course of those talks. A personal intervention on his behalf by Vladimir Putin failed to move the diplomatic block.

Deripaska has repeatedly denied any links to organised crime and blamed the US visa ban on a smear campaign by business rivals.

A spokesman for Deripaska described as "inaccurate" the assertions that the billionaire entered the US on special permits arranged by the FBI and that he provided information to FBI investigators during the trips.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Deripaska has visited the US twice this year.

The trips suggest he will not be accusing American authorities of trying to blackmail him, as he did in a BBC interview last summer. "They [did] not just revoke the visa, but [they] also made it publicly. They tried to push me in corner, maybe believing that at this point I will cooperate with them."

So what did Deripaska do on his visit to the US earlier this month? What any self-respecting billionaire might: met with Goldman Sachs’ chief executive Lloyd Blankfein.