Cameron’s shares in Afiniti were worth up to $5m prior to scandal
DAVID CAMERON was in line to make up to $5m (£3.7m) from his part-time role advising Afiniti before it was engulfed by violent sexual abuse allegations against its founder.
The former prime minister was granted share awards potentially worth millions upon joining the Bermudabased technology company in 2019, according to two sources.
At the $2.1bn valuation that Afiniti’s investors valued the company the same year, the shares would have been worth close to $5m.
Last night, Mr Cameron rejected the figure. “This figure is categorically wrong and is so far from the truth that it belongs in the realms of fantasy,” a spokesman said.
Shares in private companies are often valued differently when assessed for individuals’ accounting purposes than when they are sold to investors, which is a reflection of their potential value when a company goes public. Mr Cam- eron has previously refused to say how much he made from his work for Greensill Capital, which collapsed earlier this year.
In August he denied a BBC Panorama report, based on the finance company’s internal documents, that he made around $10m from Greensill. “David Cameron did not receive anything like the figures quoted by Panorama,” a spokesman said at the time.
Mr Cameron resigned from his role as chairman of Afiniti’s advisory board this week in response to the company’s handling of allegations from a former employee that its chief executive Zia Chishti abused her on a company trip to Brazil. His resignation came a day before Mr Chishti himself was forced to stand down.
Mr Cameron was made chairman of Afiniti’s advisory board in May 2019. The board met four times a year at its offices in New York or Bermuda.
Mr Chishti has denied the allegations. On Thursday he resigned as Afiniti’s chief executive and chairman. Taxpayer losses linked to the collapse of Greensill Capital could have been avoided if the state-owned British Business Bank (BBB) hadn’t conducted “woefully inadequate” due diligence and the Treasury had shared more information, a report has found.
The Public Accounts Committee, which scrutinises public sector spending, has said the BBB was “insufficiently curious” about where the money it lent was going and accepted too much information provided by Greensill in its application for Covid support scheme cash at face value.