Queen Elizabeth’s lawyer helped manage millions for alleged war criminal Rifaat al-Assad

Queen Elizabeth’s private solicitor spent eight years helping to manage the offshore wealth of an alleged war criminal, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) and the Guardian can reveal.

Rifaat al-Assad, uncle of former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, is known as the “butcher of Hama” due to longstanding allegations that he played a key role in the 1982 massacre of tens of thousands of Syrians. In 2024, Switzerland formally charged him with war crimes. (He has always denied these charges.)

Despite these allegations, Mark Bridges, also known as the third Baron Bridges, served as a trustee on at least five trusts holding assets on behalf of Rifaat or his relatives between 1999 and 2008, enquiries by TBIJ and the Guardian have established.

During the same period, Bridges also held arguably one of the most prestigious legal positions in Britain: private legal advisor to the British monarch. He was Elizabeth II’s lawyer from 2002 to 2018, advising her on personal legal matters as well as aspects of her constitutional role as sovereign.

There is no suggestion of any regulatory wrongdoing by Bridges, who was knighted for his services to the Queen in 2019. His firm, Farrer & Co, said his work for Rifaat had been in complete compliance with regulatory requirements in effect at the time and that Bridges had been presented with “credible information” contradicting the war crimes allegations.

But the revelations raise perennial questions about London’s role as a clearing house for questionable foreign wealth, and the ease with which rich foreign politicians can shift assets through the UK and its overseas territories. Spanish prosecutors believed that Rifaat’s wealth had swollen to more than half a billion pounds by 2019. He was convicted in French courts the following year of having acquired his fortune through crime and corruption.

The findings also raise questions about whether it was appropriate for the monarch’s personal lawyer to also be assisting an alleged war criminal, in view of the potential embarrassment to Elizabeth II had the connection been discovered while she was alive.

Assad’s ‘dirty’ empire

Rifaat al-Assad arrived in Europe in 1984 after having failed to overthrow his brother, Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, in a coup. There he began amassing a property empire spanning the most luxurious enclaves of Paris, London and the Costa del Sol.

His acquisitions, supposedly part-funded by cheques worth millions of pounds from the then king of Saudi Arabia, included Witanhurst in London’s Highgate – the largest residence in the capital after Buckingham Palace – and a seven-storey mansion near Paris’ Arc de Triomphe.

Rifaat held his property empire through offshore companies and trusts, obscuring his ownership. Many of the purchases in Spain used shell companies in Gibraltar, a British overseas territory, which later became Spanish and then Maltese companies.

In 2014, prosecutors in France began investigating whether Rifaat’s wealth had in fact been obtained through grand corruption rather than Saudi gifts. Bridges had ceased acting as a trustee for Rifaat in 2008, but continued to provide “ad-hoc and limited” legal advice until 2015, his lawyers said.

Two of the trusts Bridges had managed were said to own the Spanish portion of Rifaat’s real estate empire, including a deluxe villa with swathes of land near Marbella and a lavish Arabesque apartment complex in Puerto Banús.

In 2019, Spanish prosecutors alleged that these same trusts controlled dozens of shell companies holding more than 500 Spanish properties worth around €695m (£609m). The offshore setup, they alleged, was designed to “hide the true ownership of the huge amount of real estate properties”, and enabled the “laundering [of] dirty money from abroad”, referring to funds allegedly stolen from Syrian public coffers.

In 2020, a French court convicted Rifaat of tax fraud and laundering embezzled public money – primarily some $200m stolen from Syrian public funds and $100m in fraudulent loan agreements from Libya. He was sentenced to four years imprisonment but has never served a day of that term, having fled to Syria in 2021 while his conviction was under appeal.

Money and massacres

Eton-educated Bridges was not the only trustee serving Rifaat, but was by far the most eminent. In addition to his services to the Queen, he served as head of the international private client team at Farrer & Co, an elite law firm with a reputation forged through serving British royals and aristocrats as far back as 1789.

There is no evidence Bridges knew or suspected that Rifaat’s money was stolen. Rifaat always claimed his wealth came from benefactors, including the Saudi royal family. A Gibraltar supreme court ruling from 2018 concluded that it had been reasonable for Bridges and his fellow trustees to believe this story.

The issue of Rifaat’s status as an alleged war criminal, however, is more complicated.

In February 1982 militias affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood staged an armed uprising against the Assad regime in the city of Hama in western Syria. President Hafez al-Assad dispatched the Syrian army, as well as a paramilitary group called the Defence Brigades, to suppress the fighters.

Word of a subsequent massacre emerged rapidly. An Amnesty International report published in 1983 found that while “it is difficult to establish for certain what happened”, allegations against Syrian regime forces included “collective execution of seventy people outside the municipal hospital” and “cyanide gas containers … alleged to have been brought into the city, connected by rubber pipes to the entrances of buildings believed to house insurgents and turned on, killing all the buildings’ occupants”. It is estimated that 10,000 to 40,000 people may have been unlawfully tortured and executed.

As head of the Defence Brigades, Rifaat was understood to have taken a leading role in the carnage. In his 1989 book, the New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman described how, after initial skirmishes, “Rifaat’s tactic shifted from trying to ferret out nests of Muslim Brotherhood men to simply bringing whole neighbourhoods down on their heads and burying the Brotherhood and anyone else in the way”. Rifaat was promoted to vice-president in the wake of the uprising.

Allegations of atrocities against Rifaat were widely known at the point Bridges began working as a trustee of his offshore wealth in 1999. They were also the subject of fresh coverage following the death of his brother Hafez the following year.

In 2013, Swiss prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into Rifaat’s role in the Hama massacre. In 2021, Switzerland issued an international arrest warrant for Rifaat, and in 2024, he was formally charged with war crimes.

In desperate need

Years of civil war have ravaged the Syrian economy, causing GDP to halve between 2010 and 2020 and consigning around a quarter of Syrians to “extreme” poverty. The implosion of the Assad regime in December has left the country in dire need of recovery funds. Despite the seizure of Rifaat’s European properties in 2016 and 2017, his money is yet to find its way back to the Syrian people.

Rifaat, who was effectively in exile during the 2010s, is not believed to have had a hand in the numerous atrocities committed by his nephew Bashar during the civil war. But some have called for his illicit wealth to fund the rebuilding of the country his nephew destroyed.

“With the fall of the Assad regime, the restitution of Rifaat’s stolen assets … is now more urgent than ever,” said Chanez Mensous, advocacy and litigation manager at Sherpa, a French NGO that initiated proceedings against Rifaat. “These funds belong to the Syrian people and must be repurposed transparently for their benefit, not lost in political manoeuvres or corruption.”

Rifaat’s whereabouts are unknown. He fled Syria as rebels marched on Damascus in 2024 but did not accompany Bashar and his family to Moscow. Reports suggested he instead fled via Lebanon to Dubai. He is subject to an international arrest warrant issued by Swiss prosecutors for alleged war crimes and is a fugitive from justice following his French conviction for money laundering.

Mark Bridges referred questions about his relationship with Rifaat to Farrer & Co. A partner at the firm said that Rifaat’s trustees, including Bridges, “were provided with credible information, when they were appointed and at different junctures thereafter, which fundamentally contradicted the claims being made in the media about Mr Al-Assad”.

Legal privilege restricted Bridges and Farrer & Co from revealing what this evidence was, they said. However he did share 11 French defamation judgments, dating from the late 1980s and early 1990s, which found in Rifaat’s favour.

The majority relate to allegations made in various news outlets that Rifaat’s wealth was sourced from organised crime. Only two judgments refer to war crimes. Each found that French journalists had failed to reflect certain nuances of Amnesty International’s report by glossing over uncertainties about whether the Assad regime directly ordered the atrocities.

Public attitudes towards British lawyers acting for foreign politicians with questionable reputations or unexplained personal wealth have hardened in recent years following a series of offshore tax scandals. Support is also growing for the belief that London’s historically relaxed attitude to corruption contributed to the unaccountability of Russia’s elite and ultimately Putin’s ability to invade Ukraine.

MPs and anti-corruption campaigners have demanded that London’s legal sector choose its clients more carefully. Earlier this month a taskforce of senior lawyers and civil society experts warned that firms should require more “credible explanations” from their clients as to the source of their wealth, and that it was no longer sustainable to disregard growing reputational risks to the legal profession.

Bridges declined to comment on whether it was appropriate for the queen’s solicitor to have acted for Rifaat al-Assad, citing client privilege, or whether he would return his fees.

Farrer & Co said: “Whether the same decision [to act for Rifaat] 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.”