[noemon]

The former PM does not appear to currently be in residence and is studiously ignoring all requests for comment on the collapse of Greensill Capital – one imagines it will also transpire he ran away from home in the middle of a pandemic by accident too.

He left his daughter in a pub by accident. He took his country out of the European Union by accident. And now David Cameron seems to let a £50m payout slip through his fingers by accidentally allowing the financial services firm he was advising to go bust.

And when someone manages to find out where he is, given he does not appear to currently be in residence at any of his properties and is studiously ignoring all requests for comment on the collapse of Greensill Capital, one imagines it will also transpire he ran away from home in the middle of a pandemic by accident too. (To think how different history might be if lockdown motoring enthusiasts Cameron and Dominic Cummings had ever seen how much more they have in common than that which divides them.)

Of this holy trinity of Cameron accidents, arguably the most recent is the most negligent. Where Greensill Capital, and its impresario Lex Greensill, appear to have gone wrong is by getting involved in the very risky world of “future accounts receivables finance” – which mainly involves paying people for work they haven’t done yet.

Why didn’t Cameron stop them? What was he there for? What advice was he expected to give if not to warn them of the dangers of this kind of thing?

“Look,” he could have said. “A few years ago, someone paid me eight hundred grand for a book, and it’s not merely that I spunked half of that on a luxury shepherds hut and then delivered it two and a half years late. It’s that, having trousered the bunce, for that whole time I knew, in fact I was the only person who knew, that I was writing quite possibly the most boring memoir of all time, in which every single one of its 752 pages would somehow be even more boring than the last.”

Yet somehow that precious nugget of advice got left in the adviser’s mind palace. Oh well, these things happen.

It’s hard, really, to work out who is to blame for Greensill’s downfall. It is getting on for a decade ago that the Australian banker managed to smooth talk his way into the heart of the Cameron government. His big idea was that he could get the government to pay him to pay people they owed money to. One or two people at the time are rumoured to have said words to the effect of: “We’re the government. Why don’t we just pay them ourselves?”

But don’t let that bother you. It certainly didn’t bother Cameron. Which is precisely what should have bothered Greensill. Snake oil salesmen don’t ordinarily hire their victims as advisers, because they know better than anyone how stupid they are. So, in that sense, the two men certainly deserve each other.

Of course, the whole saga is another jaunt round the moral maze of what politicians should and shouldn’t do once they’ve stopped being politicians.

In the very old days, MPs and prime ministers were unpaid to prevent them, in theory, from being corrupted by money; though naturally excluding anyone who couldn’t afford to work for free.

Quite a long time ago, a very young Michael Heseltine is meant to have written on the back of an envelope a rough decade-by-decade life plan that involved becoming a millionaire by the age of 25, an MP by 35, all the way to Downing Street by 55. Were Heseltine young again, one imagines he might reorder a few of the paragraphs.

Cameron’s life plan, one imagines, hasn’t gone entirely as he hoped, what with the whole Brexit-by-accident, resigned-in-disgrace thing.

Viewed from not even especially afar, there is something a touch not right about a prime minister getting a banker in to get very rich indeed doing the government’s work for them, and then a few years later, said prime minister gets very rich by working for the banker in question.

Perhaps it should all be regulated in some way. But then again, if the prime minister can be relied upon to accidentally detonate his own political career, and then do the same to the companies who pay him, perhaps this murky world’s capacity for self regulation is greater than imagined.

Attempts to “finally sort out” big problems in politics do sometimes go wrong after all.

[noemon]

How Lex Greensill and David Cameron tried to woo Saudi Arabia’s crown prince

By reports of Lex Greensill’s account of the trip, the Australian financier explained he bonded under the night sky with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman over both having studied law © FT montage; Shutterstock,
Lex Greensill had penetrated the British establishment, forging close links with the country’s highest-ranking civil servants and ministers and lobbying for lucrative government contracts.

Now the Australian financier had a new sovereign client in mind, where wealth and power were more concentrated and the right relationships could transform his business: Saudi Arabia.

Before Greensill Capital collapsed this month, one of Lex Greensill’s favourite anecdotes was a camping trip he said he had taken with David Cameron and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Accompanied by the former UK prime minister, who was now his paid adviser, Greensill visited the desert with Prince Mohammed, the kingdom’s de facto leader, according to three people who heard his account of the journey. 

One of the people placed the trip during January or February 2020, shortly before the spread of coronavirus largely halted international travel. Flight records for Greensill Capital’s four private planes show a series of trips to Saudi Arabia in the first three months of last year.

A second person who heard Greensill’s account of the trip said the Australian financier explained he bonded under the night sky with the Saudi royal, commonly known as MBS, over the fact the two men had both studied law at university.

Greensill Capital declined to comment. The Saudi embassy in London declined to comment.

The Financial Times has attempted to ask Cameron about the account of the desert camping trip several times, but the former prime minister has ignored the inquiries. His role in the company’s downfall has come under growing scrutiny, after the FT revealed he lobbied former colleagues for greater access to emergency government Covid loan schemes.

Cameron, who once stood to make tens of millions of pounds from Greensill share options before the company’s collapse rendered them worthless, visited Saudi Arabia publicly in October 2019, attending the so-called “Davos in the Desert” summit in Riyadh.

The trip — a year after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents — was criticised at the time by Amnesty International, which said the former prime minister's attendance would be “interpreted as showing support for the Saudi regime” despite its “appalling human rights record”.

Cameron, who charges at least £120,000 per hour for speaking engagements, frequently used Greensill’s corporate jets to travel around the world, according to several people familiar with the matter. The FT has also seen a photograph of him aboard one of these plushly furnished aeroplanes. Flight records for one of Greensill’s aircraft show numerous trips to and from Newquay airport, which is around half an hour’s drive from Cameron’s holiday home in Cornwall. 

Air Greensill
Greensill’s fleet of aircraft, an unusual luxury even for the largest multinational companies, came in useful during another visit to Saudi Arabia.

In August 2019, SoftBank chief executive Masayoshi Son and his top lieutenant Rajeev Misra had been holding meetings in the commercial centre of Jeddah when they were invited to visit Yasir al-Rumayyan in the capital Riyadh.

Rumayyan was head of the country’s Public Investment Fund, which is in turn the largest investor in SoftBank’s $100bn Vision Fund, which has backed valuable start-ups from Uber to DoorDash.

As the men looked to change flight plans, Greensill spoke up to offer them a ride on his private jet. Some of those present were amazed the unassuming Australian had his own plane. But Greensill, then 42, had recently cemented his status as a billionaire thanks to SoftBank’s investment in his eponymous finance company. He explained he had not one, but multiple aircraft.

“We need it for clients,” one attendee recalls him explaining. “We need an air force.”

Greensill’s engagement with Saudi Arabia was multi-faceted. Last June, senior Greensill executive John Luu spoke at the “UK-Saudi Virtual Fintech Week”, an event hosted by the UK’s Department of International Trade and the British embassy in Riyadh. The event’s marketing material touted the UK's “progressive regulators” and Saudi Arabia's “young and tech-savvy population".

“We are a firm that not many people have probably heard of,” Luu said at the event. “And yet, at the same time, our reach is pretty broad.”

He went on to explain that Greensill Capital was not only “part of the family” of Saudi’s PIF due to the company’s backing from SoftBank, but also that the finance firm had “just penned an agreement to become joint-venture partners” with the sovereign wealth fund.

“As part of that, we’re establishing offices in Riyadh,” he added.

PIF did not respond to a request for comment.

Luu, whose LinkedIn profile described his role as “spearheading Greensill’s expansion into Saudi Arabia”, also said at the event that his company had contracts with “some of the largest companies in the Kingdom”, but declined to name any of them.

The one company that seemed to be the target of a multiyear charm offensive in the country was state-controlled oil company Saudi Aramco.

Greensill frequently touted that his company was in line to win a lucrative contract to offer so-called supply-chain finance to Aramco, according to people familiar with the matter. Also known as reverse factoring, Greensill’s signature financing technique involves paying a company’s suppliers upfront at a discount and is known for its ability to flatter corporate balance sheets.

The finance company never actually ended up providing any supply-chain finance to the oil company, however. Aramco, which also counts Rumayyan as its chair, declined to comment.

Modernising Mecca
Greensill was also involved in some even more speculative financing proposals in Saudi Arabia.

During the 2019 trip to Jeddah, SoftBank executives were examining how they could help the desert kingdom modernise the holy city of Mecca, which draws millions of visitors each year during the Islamic pilgrimage known as the hajj.

Different companies in the Vision Fund could play a role: US construction start-up Katerra to build new structures, Hong Kong artificial intelligence specialist SenseTime to offer facial recognition, while India’s Oyo could help set up hotels for visiting pilgrims.

And Greensill would package all this up into investment products to finance the project.

Son at this time believed the Australian financier was capable of funding increasingly grand schemes, according to people who know the SoftBank founder. He even frequently introduced Lex Greensill by a pithy nickname: “the money guy”.

“He was part of the overall solution for a smart city for Mecca,” said a person involved in the talks. “That's why Lex was down there. He was doing the financing.”

The grand vision, again, never came to fruition.

[B0ycey]

Corruption in politics. Well I never. I noticed BoJo made The Mirror a few days ago due to giving paydays to his whores affairs. Most people just drive down Soho for their quickies, but BoJo gives out public money and hand out business trips.