Howard Flight, the Tory deputy chairman sacked by Michael Howard, is a director of a banking group that was ensnared in the aborted coup in Equatorial Guinea, writes Maurice Chittenden.

Investec Bank agreed to put up $30m for agricultural businesses in the country, but did not realise the money was needed for development after the government had been overthrown.

Flight, 56, one of the richest Westminster MPs, is a former chairman of Investec’s South African asset management company and a director of several of its British-based offshoots.

He is the third leading Tory whose name has been linked to the coup attempt, although there is no suggestion that he or any other Investec directors knew about it.

In January, Sir Mark Thatcher, the son of the former prime minister, was fined 3m rand (£258,000) and given a suspended prison sentence in Cape Town for chartering a helicopter to be used as an air ambulance in the coup.

Lord Archer, the former Tory party chairman who was jailed for perjury, has denied any involvement in the coup. A payment of $134,980 from a J H Archer on March 3 last year is listed in leaked accounts from Logo Logistics, the company owned by Simon Mann, the former SAS officer jailed in Zimbabwe for organising the coup attempt. The next day Logo paid Investec $50,000, believed to be a fee for arranging the $30m loan. But Investec cancelled the deal when Mann was arrested later.

Flight said yesterday the Investec link had played no part in Howard’s decision to sack him: “It’s a complete red herring. I didn’t even know about the link to Equatorial Guinea.”

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