A peace concert next weekend is being funded by a billionaire politician on trial for arms dealing, The Times has learnt.

The World Orchestra for Peace, founded by the conductor Sir Georg Solti and featuring some of the world’s finest classical players, is due to perform for the only time this year in Jerusalem a week tomorrow. The programme, which includes Mahler’s Fifth Symphony and several works by Mendelssohn, is intended to “be a unique demonstration by all the musicians of their hopes and wishes for a lasting peace in the Middle East”.

However, according to the organisation’s website, the concert is “generously supported by Arcadi Gaydamak”, an Israeli politician of Russian origin who is one of 40 defendants in an arms trial that started in Paris on Monday.

He is accused of procuring and shipping to Angola 420 tanks, 150,000 shells, 170,000 landmines, 12 helicopters and six naval vessels worth £450 million, to help President dos Santos to win the long-run-ning war against the Unita rebels in the 1990s.

Mr Gaydamak has refused to travel to France for the arms trial – in which the son of President Mitterrand and a popular French thriller writer are also defendants – but his lawyer has said that his client does not deny the sales and will attend next month if France promises that he will not be imprisoned.

Mr Gaydamak became involved with the orchestra through his friend Valery Gergiev, who has been its conductor since Solti’s death in 1997. Gergiev, a close friend of Vladimir Putin, was accused in August of “wading brazenly into politics” after conducting the Mariinsky Orchestra in a victory concert surrounded by barbed wire in the ruined South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, days after Russian troops routed Georgian forces there.

However, it is Mr Gaydamak’s involvement that appears to run most directly against Solti’s original vision of showcasing “the unique strength of music as an ambassador for peace”. Solti set up the orchestra in 1995, gathering together players from 24 countries. His widow, Valerie, said that it had been “a wonderful dream” rooted in his experience as a Hungarian Jew in exile during the Second World War. “It’s beyond politics,” she said.

Charles Kay, the orchestra’s director, said that he learnt of the charges against Mr Gaydamak only at the end of last week, but remained “100 per cent certain in my mind that we are doing the right thing by giving this concert. I can only tell you about the man I know in the present and he is wholeheartedly behind making peace and building bridges in Israel.”

Mr Gaydamak emigrated to Israel from Russia in 1972 and has built a reputation as a free-spending political showman. During the brief Israeli-Lebanese war in 2006, when the Government was accused of abandoning vulnerable civilians, he paid for buses to evacuate townsfolk within range of Hezbollah’s rockets in the north and then took the citizens of Sderot in the south on an all expenses-paid holiday to the Red Sea resort of Eilat after they were fired on by Palestinian militants in the Gaza strip.

He owns charities, hospitals and at least one football club and is running for the mayoralty of Jerusalem.

But humanitarian campaigners say that his philanthropic activities should not distract from the gravity of the accusations against him, and some musicians involved in the concert – including the BBC Symphony Orchestra viola player Philip Hall – expressed dismay at their sponsor’s background. Lady Solti said that she had only just heard about the charges against Mr Gaydamak, and did not wish to comment.

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