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Conservative donor Lord Rami Ranger was stripped of his CBE on Friday following allegations he made derogatory comments about Pakistanis and harassed a journalist, in a rare case of an honour being forfeited.
Tech entrepreneur Lawrence Jones also had his MBE nullified after being sentenced to 15 years in prison for raping two women and sexually assaulting a former employee. Revelations about his conduct emerged following a Financial Times investigation in 2019.
A notice published in the Press Gazette on Friday stated that the King requested for Ranger and Jones’s honours to be “cancelled and annulled” and for their names to be “erased” from their respective registers.
Among those who have had their titles stripped are disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein, who had his honorary CBE stripped in 2020 following convictions for rape and sexual assault, and late Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe.
Former Post Office boss Paula Vennells also handed back her CBE earlier this year following public anger over her involvement in the Horizon scandal.
A total of six people were stripped of their honours by the King on Friday.
Ranger, 76, owns a consumer goods company called Sun Mark International. He was awarded his CBE in 2016 for services to business and community cohesion, and was awarded a peerage by former prime minister Theresa May in 2019.
He has donated about £1.4mn to the Conservative party since 2009.
The House of Lords opened an investigation into Ranger in 2022 after independent journalist Poonam Joshi accused him of intimidation and bullying.
In a string of social media posts, Ranger described Joshi as an “evil woman”, a “disgrace”, the “epitome of filth and garbage”.
Though the Lords committee withdrew the whip from Ranger last year, it was restored last month.
Ranger was also criticised last year after writing to the BBC to complain about a controversial documentary about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in which he demanded to know whether “Pakistani-origin staff were behind this nonsense”.
He subsequently apologised and withdrew his complaint to the BBC.
He was separately embroiled in a legal dispute last year with members of the Sikh community after he described the campaign group Sikhs for Justice as “the enemies of India”.
A spokesperson for Lord Ranger said he had “not committed any crime nor has he broken any law”, saying he was “devastated” by the decision.
They added: “It is a sad indictment that the honours system which is designed to empower individuals who go the extra mile and as a result contribute a great deal to the nation should be used to curtail the basic fundamental rights of free speech and thought process.”
Jones was a successful entrepreneur who founded internet hosting business UKFast, and was awarded an MBE in 2015 for services to the digital economy.
In 2019, the FT published an investigation into his workplace conduct and treatment of female employees, prompting him to quit the company he founded 20 years earlier. He was found guilty of rape and sexual assault last year.
