UK probe to examine David Cameron’s not so hidden hand
The scandal first came to public attention when financial services company Greensill Capital filed for insolvency in March, with the firm’s bankruptcy threatening thousands of jobs in the UK steel industry.
Media investigations soon showed that the firm’s founder, Lex Greensill, had inserted himself into the highest echelons of government under former Prime Minister David Cameron, who since leaving No.10 Downing Street had lobbied on behalf of Greensill among cabinet members.
The revelations expose the seemingly unbreakable links between the City of London — the UK’s financial center — and Westminster politics.
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Fallen leaders
Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazil
Lula has been found guilty of corruption and money laundering for his involvement in the “Car Wash” scandal, an extensive corruption probe that uncovered widespread bribery among Brazil’s elites. Lula, who held the presidential office between 2003 and 2010, was sentenced to 12 years in jail. He still has a chance to appeal the ruling.
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Cristina Fernandez, Argentina
Cristina Fernandez, who served as Argentina’s first lady and then as its president from 2007 to 2015, was indicted on corruption charges in 2016. She was accused of granting public construction contracts to favored companies. She denies any wrongdoing. Fernandez is now seeking a political comeback, which some observers say is a bid to seek immunity against the charges.
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Park Geun-hye, South Korea
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Ehud Olmert, Israel
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Adrian Nastase, Romania
Adrian Nastase was convicted of corruption charges in 2012 and sentenced to a two-year imprisonment term. At the time when the sentence was pronounced, he was the only head of government sentenced to prison in the 23 years following the Romanian Revolution. He was Romania’s prime minister from 2004-2006.
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Charles G. Taylor, Liberia
Charles G. Taylor was sentenced to 50 years in prison in 2012 for his role in atrocities committed in Sierra Leone during its civil war in the 1990s. Taylor was the first former head of state convicted by an international tribunal since the Nuremberg trials in Germany after World War II. He was Liberia’s president from 1997-2003.
The politics of sleaze
In mid-April, Downing Street announced an independent review of the way representations were made to the government by Greensill Capital and Cameron.
When Johnson launched the commission, he may have seen it as a way of banking some political capital. It would distance him from the politics of Cameron, in particular his government’s highly unpopular austerity measures.
Johnson himself is under attack for alleged scandals. COVID equipment procurement contracts, for example, were handed out early in the pandemic by the Johnson government so that companies with little or no relevant experience landed contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds.
In June last year, it was revealed that Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick rushed through a planning permission for a one billion pound property scheme two weeks before developer Richard Desmond donated 12,000 pounds to the Conservative party. Then there is Jennifer Arcuri, Johnson’s former lover, who received 126,000 pounds in public money, some of it from London’s City Hall while Johnson was mayor.
Paul Heywood of the University of Nottingham, who studies political corruption, described the revelations about Cameron’s lobbying as “extraordinary.”
“It’s either completely disingenuous, it’s naive or it’s dissembling. He must recognize that it’s not the route that he took that’s at issue, it’s the fact of what he did,” Heywood told society magazine Tatler.
Weak self-regulation
Bernard Jenkin, a conservative MP who led an inquiry into links between government and business a few years ago, said the way to combat the problem is to demand that serving ministers and civil servants report inappropriate conduct by lobbyists. “It’s been a culture in Whitehall that’s been building up for a long time,” Jenkin told the BBC.
In 2014, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government led by Cameron saw its lobbying legislation pass into law. The Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act introduced a register for consultant lobbyists and two bodies were established to oversee this kind of activity.
“The UK’s real problem is that whilst we do have procedures in place to regulate lobbying and post-government appointments, they are just woefully inadequate,” Daniel Bruce, chief executive of Transparency International UK, told CNN.
In March this year, the Office of the Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists found Cameron was not required to have registered his lobbying for Greensill because Cameron was an in-house employee of Greensill and so his activities did “not fall within the criteria that require registration.”
Cameron has admitted that he’d lobbied numerous others to discuss using Greensill services in the UK’s National Health Service (NHS).
People don’t seem to care
Meanwhile, a recent Times poll gave Johnson’s conservative Tories a 14-point lead over the opposition Labour Party.
Ben Page, chief executive of the UK pollster Ipsos MORI, thinks the British public “sadly resigned to this type of thing” as people are “not that concerned about corruption compared to most countries.”
“There have been successive lobbying scandals for decades. Each time rules are tightened but then a new one emerges — as long as people do not personally enrich themselves directly I do not expect much change,” he told DW.
Article source: https://www.dw.com/en/uk-probe-to-examine-david-cameron-s-not-so-hidden-hand/a-57271850?maca=en-rss-en-bus-2091-xml-atom