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Members of one of Britain’s richest families have been found guilty of breaching charity law over donations of almost £1 million to the Conservative Party. The Weston family controls a string of businesses, from Primark to Fortnum & Mason, through a charitable trust.

The Charity Commission has found that some of the family members who run the Garfield Weston Foundation allowed an investment company it controlled to make political donations between 1993 and 2007. Wittington Investments Ltd gave £100,000 to the Conservative Party each year from 1993 to 1999, except in 1995 when it donated £200,000. The payments stopped when a new law required shareholders to give approval for political donations, but it made a further £100,000 donation in 2004. Between 2000 and 2007 Wittington donated £70,000 to the Centre for Policy Studies, a think-tank with close links to the Conservative Party. It also gave £305,000 to the anti-EU European Foundation and £45,000 to the anti-single currency Labour Euro-Safeguards Campaign.

All the trustees of the Garfield Weston Foundation are members of the family and four have also been directors of Wittington Investments during the whole period that the political donations were made. The Commission has ruled that the four Weston family directors of Wittington breached their legal duty as trustees of the charity by “failing to give proper consideration” to whether the company should be allowed to make political donations to the Conservative Party.

The current trustees are George Weston, chief executive of Associated British Foods; Guy Weston, chairman of Heal & Son; Kate Hobhouse, chairman of Fortnum & Mason; and Galen Weston, who is based in Canada.

The Charity Commission also found that the charity’s nine trustees breached their duties in January 2006 by voting for a resolution allowing Wittington to make donations without giving proper consideration. The regulator said it was not ordering the trustees to repay the donations because it had not established that they committed the breaches knowingly or recklessly.

Wittington is seeking legal advice on whether the donations made between 2000 and 2007 should be reimbursed. An individual has reimbursed the 2004 donation to the Conservatives.

The Foundation said that “at no point did the trustees consider these as effectively donations by the charity itself”.