Exclusive: Sadiq Khan’s Taylor Swift tickets were gifted by a company awarded £45m contracts by City Hall

An events company that gifted Taylor Swift tickets worth thousands of pounds to Sir Sadiq Khan and his team has been paid £44.7m by City Hall, The Londoner can reveal, including a major contract for overseeing the Queen’s funeral. The revelation raises serious questions about whether Khan tried to conceal a potential conflict of interest from the public.

The mayor is under investigation by City Hall's standards watchdog for accepting the tickets and has faced increasing pressure after it was revealed by the BBC last year that he filed false details about who had gifted him the tickets and how much they were worth. Khan corrected his declaration of interest, disclosing that the concert tickets — worth around £3,000 — were a gift from LS Events, a company that has put on major events in London in partnership with the mayor’s Greater London Authority (GLA).

The GLA’s monitoring officer is looking into whether Khan “exercised an appropriate level of caution” in deciding to accept the tickets. GLA rules state that: “Particular caution should be taken where any gift and/or hospitality is offered from any company that holds a contract with the GLA or is likely to bid for a future contract.”

Until now, Khan has refused to disclose how much business LS Events has done with City Hall, citing commercial confidentiality. But The Londoner has examined dozens of documents relating to GLA spending, which show that LS Events has won a staggering £44.7m of business in just the past three years. The majority of this was paid in the year 2022 to 2023, the year of the Queen’s funeral.

In that year, LS Events was paid £38.1m by City Hall. On its website, the company says it was “privileged” to have a central role in “Operation London Bridge” — the code-name for the long-planned sequence of events that followed the Queen’s death. When the Queen died in September 2022, LS Events says it acted as the “central event management agency tasked with coordinating and delivering the overarching event management plan, resulting in one of the largest pan-London coordinated projects ever seen”.

It’s unclear when LS Events was given this incredibly lucrative job — one interview with senior figures from the company suggests it won the tender during the pandemic. But it’s a matter of record that LS Events was part of City Hall’s “approved suppliers” for outdoor events last year, an elite list of just six firms that get prioritised access to bid on GLA contracts, sometimes unopposed. On top of the £44.7m in past contracts, LS Events has also been awarded a share of some £16m worth of future contracts, although it’s not known what their exact share is. 

In response to our reporting, ​​Emma Best, the deputy leader of the Conservative opposition in City Hall, told The Londoner: “This already sleazy situation could be even worse than first thought. We are calling for no stone to be left unturned in the search for truth in the inquiry into the mayor's behaviour... If these allegations are true, the mayor has demeaned his office and should resign.”

A spokesperson for LS Events told The Londoner the practice of giving tickets was “commonplace” and stressed that in all its work to win contracts for City Hall it was subject to “the rigorous contracting and procurement requirements each of them entails”. They would not confirm, when asked, what proportion of the company’s income comes from The GLA.

A spokesperson for the mayor told us Khan was “a proud champion of the capital’s world-leading creative and sporting industries” and stressed that he is “not involved in the tendering of contracts, which follow full and open processes” and that all gifts are “declared openly and transparently”. In the past, Khan has described himself as “the most open and transparent mayor of London ever”.

When Khan first registered details of the gift of the tickets, the disclosure said that they were a gift from the Football Association as “a thank you for successful Champions League final delivery” and were worth £1,164. But as pressure mounted on senior Labour politicians — including prime minister Sir Keir Starmer — about accepting gifts, the mayor changed his disclosure, admitting the tickets were worth £3,000 and were paid for by LS Events.

The BBC then reported that LS Events was awarded a contract to run the “Diwali on the Square” event for the next four years just eight days before the concert. City Hall said Khan has no role in awarding the contract and insisted there was “no conflict of interest”. Khan’s behaviour was described as “pretty fishy” by Neil Garratt, the Conservative leader on the London Assembly, who said “the mayor can’t get his story straight over who’s paying for his lavish hospitality and what they wanted in return”.

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According to our analysis, Khan received over £25,000 worth of gifts in 2024, a record high for his eight years as mayor, including the Taylor Swift tickets, multiple football tickets, a dinner in honour of the Emir of Qatar and trips to overseas conferences. In the past, he has been criticised for accepting free tickets to watch Liverpool FC, the team he supports, play matches that weren’t taking place in London. 

A leading anti-corruption charity told The Londoner it has concerns about the “largesse” being enjoyed by the mayor and figures at City Hall. George Havenhand from Spotlight on Corruption told us: “The scale of the largesse provided to the mayor and City Hall staff — and wider culture of accepting hospitality and gifts — raises serious questions about what is expected in return”. He called on City Hall to “create a presumption against accepting gifts and hospitality unless there is a good public interest reason for doing so.”

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