Bosses in GKN bid gave £170,000 to the Tories
TWO bosses of the predatory firm that has launched a hostile bid for defence giant GKN donated £170,000 to the Conservative Party.
Melrose vice- chairman David Roper, 67, has donated £131,375 since 2014, while chairman Christopher Miller, 66, has given £40,492, according to figures published by the Electoral Commission.
The Government is under mounting pressure to intervene to block Melrose’s £7.4billion bid for GKN amid fears it could harm national security and industry.
GKN makes key parts for cars, aircraft and fighter jets. Its clients include the US and UK militaries, Airbus and Mercedes, and it employs 6,000 people in the UK and 58,000 around the world.
Theresa May has signalled she will act to block the takeover if that is in the national interest. Yesterday it emerged the Government was exploring whether it could intervene on national security grounds.
Len McCluskey, the head of the union Unite, which is opposed to the takeover, said last night: ‘ In light of this revelation, it is also important that the Prime Minister stays true to her promise to act on the national interest.
‘That means intervening to stop a great British manufacturer from falling into the wrong hands.’
Melrose said the company itself made no political donations. It declined to comment further on the donations last night.
Melrose specialises in buying up underperforming businesses and turning them around before selling them on within three to five years. Its bosses are now battling GKN’s new American boss Anne Stevens, 69, for control of the 259-year-old firm.
Mr Miller and Mr Roper founded Melrose with Simon Peckham, 55, the firm’s chief executive, after working together at the conglomerate Wassall.
They and finance director Geoffrey Martin, 50, could split £ 258million if the takeover of GKN is a success and they double the firm’s value.
They split £160million last May at the end of a five-year payout scheme. Rugby fan Mr Roper earned a basic salary of £548,000 at Melrose in 2016. He trained as an accountant at KPMG after taking a degree in metallurgy at Nottingham University.
He rose to become deputy chief executive at Wassall, where he earned the nickname ‘The Grinder’ for his financial inquisitions of target companies.
Mr Miller, who was paid £549,000 for the year ending December 2016, is a former acolyte of legendary City asset- stripper Lord Hanson. His family owns Harris and Sheldon, an industrial conglomerate in Coventry, which has hunting and fishing sites. Mr Miller and his brother Michael, 63, were ranked 868th on the Sunday Times Rich List this year with a net worth of £126million.
GKN’s board has slammed Melrose’s bid as cheap and opportunistic. GKN makes parts for the US-UK F-35 fighter jet, US B-21 stealth bomber and Eurofighter Typhoon. It is arguably the UK’s most important engineering firm after BAE and Rolls-Royce.
On Wednesday in a rare intervention Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson said he had concerns about the potential takeover. He said: ‘There is no clarity as to what the true approach is going to be in terms of the GKN military side of the business.’
The Commons business committee is due to hold a hearing on the bid on March 6, with both GKN and Melrose due to give evidence.
According to the register of interests Conservative peer Lord Glendonbrook, 76, the former owner of the airline BMI, owns shares in Melrose, among dozens of other companies.
So does Lord Lupton, 62, a former treasurer of the Tory party.
Melrose says of its bid for GKN: ‘We believe that while there are no competition or national security issues, it is in fact in the national interest for Melrose to be the guardian of GKN’s businesses.’
IT’S long been clear to the Mail that Mr Corbyn has no interest in controlling immigration, and regards those who do with something close to contempt.
How else to explain his choice of Diane Abbott as shadow home secretary, who – terrifying thought – would take charge of our borders if he wins power?
Just as clear is Labour’s determination to hide their views from voters. This surely explains why Miss Abbott made a major speech on the issue this week to which only hand-picked journalists were invited, and then released a highly sanitised version of her remarks.
What she didn’t want the public to hear was her view that politicians are largely incapable of controlling migrant numbers. (Her clear implication was: so why bother?)
she also argued, absurdly, that the last Labour government – which threw open our borders to the greatest mass migration in this island’s history – was in fact too tough.
But most offensive of all, Miss Abbott attempted to link today’s attitudes to those in Germany between the wars.
One of the reasons that so many Labour voters in the North backed Brexit was their understandable concerns about the impact of immigration on hospitals, schools and other public services. Are these Miss Abbott’s Nazis?
No wonder those comments were missing from the speech she sent to the media. MANY cynical observers would be troubled by the revelation that two of the corporate vultures behind Melrose, the private equity firm trying to buy up and break up British engineering giant GKN, have between them donated £170,000 to the Conservative Party since 2014. Particularly as Business secretary Greg Clark remains silent on the hostile takeover so crucial to Britain’s post-Brexit future. Not the Mail. This paper has complete faith in ministers’ integrity. so we are confident their decisions will in no way be clouded by donations but instead based wholly on the interests of the nation!