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Greensill Capital, whose financial company, received a salary of more than $ 1 million from David Cameron dramatic collapse exposed the intense pressures of the former prime minister.
Two people familiar with the matter said Cameron was earning the large annual salary for his role as a part-time consultant, which included an increasingly desperate attempt to secure government funding for the troubled company. A Cameron spokesman declined to comment.
Cameron was hired to work 25 days a year as a board advisor, meaning he earned the equivalent of more than $ 40,000 a day.
His efforts to secure access to state-backed coronavirus emergency loans, first revealed by the FT, have landed the former Conservative party leader in the greater Westminster area pressure scandal for a generation.
When Cameron was transported before the deputies investigating the Greensill scandal in May, he said he had been paid “a generous annual amount – Much more than I earned [£150,000] as prime minister ”. However, he refused to disclose the exact figure, describing it as a “private matter”.
As the coronavirus pandemic spread across Britain in 2020, Cameron put pressure on several ministers and senior officials on 56 different occasions in an attempt to secure Greensill’s access to two government-run emergency lending systems. .
The former prime minister told members of the Treasury’s select committee that this relentless pressure was not motivated by personal gain, but because he thought the company “had a good idea of how to help extend credit to thousands of companies.”
When Greensill finally got access to a coronavirus loan plan for large companies, he extended his total bonus of £ 400 million in tax-secured loans. companies linked to Sanjeev Gupta – the metal tycoon that the business empire now has under investigation of the Office of Serious Fraud.
Cameron’s salary made him one of the highest earners in Greensill, according to people familiar with the company’s salary scale. By contrast, the head of the U.S. division of Greensill, a career banker with 25 years of experience, earned just over $ 400,000 a year, according to U.S. bankruptcy filings.
Cameron was not the only highly paid former politician on Greensill’s payroll. The finance company also hired former Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop as an adviser, paying an annual salary equivalent to more than $ 600,000, according to two people familiar with her salary. Bishop did not respond to requests for comment.
In January 2020, Bishop accompanied Cameron and the company’s Australian founder, Lex Greensill, to the Davos World Economic Forum, where they were presented a flexible salary scheme to the then Australian Minister of Finance, Mathias Cormann. However, Australian officials rejected the scheme and described it as “economically similar to payday loans”.
Cameron’s work for Greensill was extensive. After joining the financial firm in mid-2018, the former prime minister accompanied his Australian founder in meetings around the world with businessmen and politicians young and old, often flying one of the company’s private jets.
This went from the accompaniment of Lex Greensill in one desert camping trip to Saudi Arabia – where the couple tried to lure the crown prince of the Gulf kingdom, Mohammed bin Salman, – to meet with a dark australian insurance company, who was later fired for allegedly breaching risk limits in Greensill Capital.
Cameron also launched Greensill’s services insenior German government official in November 2020, just as research on its German bank took off. The management of the bank is already underway criminal investigation in Germany.
Cameron stood up to make one even greater rainfall of the stock options granted to him when he joined Greensill, which at one time was said to be worth tens of millions of pounds, but which are now worth nothing.
Cameron has described this valuation as “absurd,” but has declined to reveal how much he could have earned if Greensill had successfully traded on the stock market.
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