Former British Prime Minister David Cameron may be under investigation for his ties to Australian financier Lex Greensill, whose company went down this month.
Greensill is said to have had an unpaid but influential role at the heart of the government years before he hired Cameron as an adviser and used him to lobby senior ministers at the start of the pandemic, the British business newspaper Financial Times reports.
In his role as an advisor, which has never been formally disclosed, Greensill had access to at least 11 government departments before taking on a formal role as “crown commissioner” in 2014. According to the complainants, taxpayers deserve to know to what extent Greensill Capital had access to the government through the former Conservative Prime Minister.
The Committee on Standards in Public Life, an influential watchdog for norms and values, has told the newspaper that it is considering an investigation. This after proposals from the British Labor party. A former chairman of the standards committee called for a “full investigation” and described the allegations as a “real scandal”.
Labor has urged the committee to investigate how Greensill was given a desk and a pass in the Cabinet Office ten years ago. His links with certain politicians should also be investigated.
The committee was also asked to investigate how Cameron, hired by Greensill in 2018, began lobbying senior government officials in the UK, including Treasury Secretary Rishi Sunak, to give the company better access to Covid-19 credit schemes…
While the commission cannot impose sanctions on individuals, it does influence the government. In the past, recommendations have led to establishing various bodies, such as the Adviser on Ministerial Interests and the Electoral Commission.
The Financial Times previously revealed that Cameron had stock options in Greensill that could have been worth $ 70 million had the company gone public. Greensill Capital filed for bankruptcy earlier this month. That was the culmination of the financial company’s spectacular collapse after major lenders pulled out over concerns about its assets’ valuations. Earlier this month, Greensill’s Australian holding company also went bankrupt.