Cameron: I’m sorry (sort of)
He breaks his Greensill silence to stress he broke no rules – but admits he shouldn’t have lobbied ministers via text
DAVID Cameron last night admitted he should have acted differently in his contact with ministers about Greensill Capital as he finally broke his silence on the lobbying scandal.
The former prime minister issued a statement acknowledging that communications with the Government should be made ‘through only the most formal of channels’.
Mr Cameron was a paid adviser to Greensill, whose collapse is threatening thousands of steel jobs in the UK, and wanted it to get access to an official coronavirus support scheme.
But his approaches to ministers – including Chancellor Rishi Sunak – in a bid to secure Government money for the specialist lender have caused outrage in
Whitehall. After weeks of silence, Mr Cameron said: ‘In my representations to Government, I was breaking no codes of conduct and no Government rules.
‘Ultimately, the outcome of the discussions I encouraged about how Greensill’s proposals might be included in the Government’s CCFF [Covid Corporate Financing Facility] initiative... was that they were not taken up. However, I have reflected on this at length.
‘As a former prime minister, I accept that communications with Government need to be done through only the most formal of channels, so there can be no room for misinterpretation.’
Greensill’s request for the terms of the CCFF – run by the Bank of England – to be altered was rejected. It was the main lender to businessman Sanjeev Gupta’s GFG Alliance which employs 5,000 people in the UK, including 3,000 at Liberty Steel – jobs now at risk after Greensill filed for insolvency, also rendering Mr Cameron’s reported tens of millions of pounds of share options worthless.
It could also cost the Scottish Government £32million a year for 25 years as part of a guarantee offered to a smelter in Fort William, Inverness-shire, in a complex deal linked to Greensill and GFG.
It emerged yesterday that the ex-PM emailed Boris Johnson’s senior special adviser asking him to rethink the application hours after it was rejected. In an email to Sheridan Westlake last April, Mr Cameron said: ‘It seems nuts to exclude supply chain finance [Greensill’s speciality].
‘We all know that the banks will struggle to get these loans out the door – and so other methods of extending credit to firms become even more important.’
Meanwhile, Matt Hancock became the fourth minister to be embroiled in the scandal – after
Mr Sunak and two Treasury ministers – as it emerged he had a ‘private drink’ with Mr Cameron and the firm’s founder.
The Health Secretary met the former PM and Australian banker Lex Greensill in October 2019.
Mr Greensill’s firm wanted to introduce a scheme to pay doctors and nurses daily or weekly. Last April it was announced that Earnd, then a division of Greensill, would be available for free to NHS employees to access their pay.
The scheme saw Earnd provide payment to employees before recouping staff salaries from the NHS. Greensill framed the scheme as benevolent, but senior former employees say the plan was to convert the NHS’s future payments into bonds and sell them.
The developments, reported by The Sunday Times, led to questions over Mr Cameron’s actions.
Sir Alistair Graham, the former chairman of the committee for standards in public life, described the affair as the ‘biggest lobbying scandal in a generation’ and said there should be an inquiry.
‘Reflected at length’