Sunak asked staff to help Cameron over Covid cash
RISHI SUNAK ‘pushed’ Treasury staff to explore ways of lending taxpayers’ money to a finance firm which employed David Cameron.
Text messages sent by the chancellor to the former prime minister, released last night by the government, show he offered to help his fellow Tory with efforts to bail out Greensill Capital.
It raises further questions over Mr Cameron’s involvement with the firm, which collapsed last month.
He has come under fire for not registering his lobbying for Greensill, a major backer of troubled Liberty Steel, but a watchdog has cleared him of wrongdoing.
The Treasury said the messages showed that Mr Sunak (pictured) had nothing to hide because he had ultimately turned down Mr Cameron’s request for Greensill to benefit from a state-backed Covid loans scheme.
But Labour said a full investigation was needed to establish if Greensill had been given favourable treatment because of its political links.
In one of the messages, sent in April last year, Mr Sunak wrote: ‘Hi David... I think the proposals in the end did require a change to the market notice but I have pushed the team to explore an alternative with the Bank that might work.’
The chancellor added: ‘No guarantees, but the Bank are currently looking at it.’
Mr Sunak confirmed in a letter to shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds last night that Mr Cameron ‘reached out informally’ by phone ‘on the matter of Greensill Capital’s access to the CCFF (Covid Corporate Financing Facility)’. He added that ‘following appropriate consultations the request was turned down’.
But Ms Dodds said: ‘There must be a full, transparent and thorough investigation into the chain of events that saw Greensill awarded lucrative contracts.’