It was a phone call from 4,000 miles away on Friday morning that finally ended a frantic spring cleaning within the Conservative party’s Westminster headquarters.

Speaking from his vast estate in the Brazilian rainforest Johan Eliasch, the Swedish sports equipment tycoon, had some good news.

Ever since the loans for peerages scandal engulfed Labour, the Tories had been desperate to avoid being caught in the backwash.

Labour’s disclosure that it took secret loans from 12 donors — four of whom were nominated for peerages — had put the Tories under pressure to come clean on their own covert financing.

Jonathan Marland, the pugnacious Tory treasurer, had stalled for time, claiming that he could not release the names because of confidentiality agreements with the lenders.

In truth, Tory HQ was in turmoil. “It was frantic to say the least,” said a source last week. Lord Ashcroft, the deputy chairman and a big donor himself, was called in to sort things out.

“Ashcroft was dominating, grabbing Francis Maude [the chairman] out of meetings to get a grip on the situation,” said the source. “It looked like they were clearing everything up.”

Yet with hours to go before a planned announcement of the lenders on Friday, the party had still not persuaded them all to go public.

It needed to generate a large amount of money quickly to pay the uncooperative lenders off so that their names would not have to be released. A total of £5m — including cash from foreign backers — had to be wiped from the books.

Some arrived, but not enough. Then Eliasch stepped into the breach.

The 43-year-old Swede, who counts Bjorn Borg and Prince Andrew among his friends, bases his business in London and is a deputy treasurer of the Tory party.

In his last-minute call from Brazil, he pledged a £2.6m loan that enabled the Tories to pay off the last of the secret lenders. On Friday afternoon, the party was able to name a cleaned-up list of 13 donors. They were the usual Tory suspects — well-known supporters who had not recently been nominated for honours. And there were no foreigners.

This weekend, however, the party’s attempt to buy itself out of trouble may have backfired. Labour, seeking to deflect attention from its own role in the scandal, was quick to grasp the point.

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