Row over Osborne’s plum job
TROUBLING questions were raised last night over George Osborne’s lucrative new job at a finance giant.
It has emerged that the former chancellor met BlackRock executives five times in his last two years at the Treasury.
The final meeting came last July, days before Theresa May sacked him. Mr Osborne has since landed a part-time advisory role at BlackRock – the world’s largest asset manager – on what is thought to be a sixfigure salary.
The Whitehall appointments watchdog is under pressure over why it waved through Mr Osborne’s appointment without objection.
The Acoba committee told him it had ‘no concerns’ about the post because he had made no policy decisions relating to the firm’s interests.
But in another twist yesterday
it emerged that Acoba later corrected the letter – to admit that Mr Osborne did make decisions affecting the asset management industry.
Media reports from three years ago show that BlackRock gleefully greeted Mr Osborne’s pension reforms, which gave savers control over their retirement pots. It said it was ‘uniquely positioned’ to take advantage.
Opposition MPs last night described Acoba’s handling of the matter as farcical. ‘George Osborne is trading on his ministerial contacts book,’ said John Mann, a Labour member of the Treasury committee. ‘This looks very bad. It is outrageous if he makes any contact at all with the Bank of England, the regulator or the Treasury.’
Douglas Carswell of Ukip said: ‘This embarrassing bungle exposes Acoba for the Whitehall farce that it is. It is a committee of grandees who rubber stamp rather than scrutinise. Parliament should make this its business.’
A former Cabinet minister said: ‘It’s clear that Osborne has been milking his contacts for all they were worth.’
The episode will fuel calls for the reform of Acoba, the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, which is supposed to vet ministers and senior civil servants when they take jobs in the private sector after leaving office. However, it has looked at more than 370 appointments over the past eight years without blocking a single one.
Mr Osborne’s job with BlackRock was announced on Friday afternoon – an hour before the inauguration of President Donald Trump. The former chancellor said that he was taking a one day a week role, combining it with his work as an MP.
Acoba is supposed to examine such appointments for potential conflicts of interest. The Treasury’s official records of ministerial meetings yesterday showed Mr Osborne met BlackRock five times from October 2014. Before that, only junior ministers had met with the firm since 2010. There is no suggestion a future job was discussed at any of these meetings.
After Mr Osborne’s appointment was announced, it emerged that Civil Service Commission chief executive Peter Lawrence had written to him on behalf of Acoba chairman Baroness Browning to say Treasury permanent secretary Tom Scholar ‘had no concerns about you taking the post’.
‘The committee… was reassured by confirmation from your former department, Her Majesty’s Treasury, that there were no specific policy decisions from your time in office that would have specifically affected BlackRock,’ he wrote.
On Monday afternoon, Acoba was forced to backtrack and amended its letter to take account of how BlackRock had benefited from Mr Osborne’s reforms. ‘The committee… was reassured by confirmation from your former department, Her Majesty’s Treasury that... none of the decisions from your time in office were specific to BlackRock.’
A spokesman for Mr Osborne said BlackRock was a highly respected financial institution’ and added: ‘Chancellors and other ministers have always met with them, and continue to do so... and the fact of those meetings is, rightly, made publicly available at the time. The independent Advisory Committee on Business Appointments is there to ensure that any appointments of ex-ministers are properly vetted.
‘Not only have they cleared this appointment but they explicitly say in their letter to Mr Osborne that “none of the decisions from your time in office were specific to BlackRock; and the Treasury Permanent Secretary had no concerns about you taking up this post”.’
An Acoba spokesman said the advice letter had been changed because of a ‘secretarial error’. BlackRock made no comment.
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