Dishy Rishi’s Dodgy Deals

Chancellor Rishi Sunak failed to disclose details of his wife’s investments but that’s the least of the failings of a Chancellor who looks set to cost the country more than any of his predecessors.


FILE PHOTO: Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak leaves Downing Street, in London, Britain October 14, 2020. REUTERS/John Sibley
FILE PHOTO: Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak leaves Downing Street, in London, Britain October 14, 2020. REUTERS/John Sibley
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LONDON (Labour Buzz) - Another week and another Government minister facing questions about the Ministerial code. Furiously denying impropriety is all becoming part of the day’s routine for Johnson and his ragtag bag of cronies. However, this time it’s the golden boy himself Dishy Rishi whose in the firing line. 

Sunak is a rare creature this year, a popular Tory politician. As a politician, he’s so slickly oiled that Greenpeace could call him an environmental hazard. He’s the kind of person who can’t get ready for spending review without somehow turning it into a shoot for the Littlewoods Catalogue, and whose idea of fiscal responsibility is throwing money at everything which moves. 

In one sense his popularity is pretty easy to understand. It was, after all on his say so, that the Government picked up half of everyone’s restaurant bills throughout August. However, on another, it’s absolutely inexplicable, because almost nothing he’s tried this year has worked. 

This is a Chancellor who, by his own estimates, is about to oversee the biggest drop on GDP in 300 years. While every country has struggled in the face of the pandemic, Britain has fared worse than almost anybody else. 

His government has splurged billions of pounds on unsuitable PPE from people who know nothing about it and produced a jobs support scheme which has failed to prevent hundreds of thousands of people being made unemployed.  

Now, we hear that he’s every bit as corrupt as the rest of them after he failed to declare his wife’s multi-billion-pound portfolio of shares and investments in the register of MPs’ interests. 

Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi has written to Lord Evans, chair of the committee on standards in public life, asking him to look into whether the Chancellor has broken the Ministerial Code of Practice. She said revelations about his wife’s wealth raised serious concerns about his conduct. 

On Friday the Guardian revealed that Sunak’s wife, Akshata Murty, was richer than the Queen thanks to a £430 million shareholding in the IT multinational Infosys. The firm was founded by her father and is a contractor to the UK and public companies. 

However, that’s just the start of her holdings. She also holds shares in at least six UK companies, none of which investments made their way onto the Chancellor’s entry in the official registry. 

Under the ministerial code, ministers must disclose details of any financial interests held by themselves or their close family which are relevant to their role in government and ‘might be thought to give rise to a conflict’, with their public duties. 

Sunak and his wife have not responded to requests for comment directly. However, the Treasury has said he made a full declaration of his wife’s interests to senior civil servants. He met with the government’s then head of propriety and ethics, Helen MacNamara to decide what needed to be declared according to another one of those government sources and is said to have been ‘satisfied’ by what was declared. 

However, this is yet another blot on an increasingly blotchy copybook for the government. It comes after it has been hauled over the coals for questionable procurement practices which appear to have given the red carpet treatment to firms run by people with contacts in the government regardless of whether they have any prior experience of PPE. 

Sunak, meanwhile, has seen billions of pounds wasted from the government purse, decided the people who should pay for his spending should be the very people working on the frontline to battle the virus which his government seems so incapable of slowing down. 

None of this fits in with the sleek golden boy impression he’d like to project, but neither should it be a surprise. In a former life, Sunak made a fortune from exactly the kind of reckless casino banking which destroyed the economy in 2008. 

Indeed he was part of a team of hedge fund bosses who profited from a deal which helped light the sparks for the crisis. At the time, he was a partner at a hedge fund which launched an activist campaign against Dutch Bank ABN Amro which resulted in it being sold to RBS. 

This is the kind of tactic TCI have become famous for taking aggressive positions on listed companies in an effort to force management to change strategy. They create havoc in the market and pick up the pieces from the resulting carnage. 

The deal loaded RBS with crippling debt which contributed to its £45.5bn bailouts from the government. While people were left destitute and lives were ruined Sunak and his friends laughing all the way to the bank. 

Of course, back then it wasn’t Sunak and others who had played a role in the financial crisis who bore the brunt. For their recklessness, they were rewarded with bailouts, new jobs and pay rises. Everyone else carried the can. 

As Chancellor, he has made sure that, once again, the rich have profited while ordinary people have been left to pick up the tab. He’s provided grants for second homeowners, given landlords a mortgage holiday while leaving their tenants in the cold. He allowed a stamp duty holiday which supercharged housing prices and led to a bonanza for property speculators and landlords. In some cases, it even persuaded landlords to turf paying tenants out onto the streets in order to make a quick buck. 

Even his support packages for workers was lopsided. Countless self-employed people were left with no support at all while others received more than they needed. The furlough scheme was widely abused and failed to stop hundreds of thousands of people from receiving unemployment cheques. 

Last but not least, let’s not forget August’s super speedy eat out to help out campaign which has been shown by a number of studies to have contributed to the second wave.

Sunak’s record in this pandemic has, therefore, arguably been worse than any other government minister. He is leading the UK to the worse slump for hundreds of years and has ensured the UK has suffered one of the worst financial hits of any leading nation. 

By any yardstick, he has failed miserably. He has wasted money on people who didn’t need, denied it to people who did, he has failed to keep the economy on track and see billions of pounds of taxpayer money vanish into the ether. That, as the Guardian report shows, he fails to fulfil the basics of financial transparency is the least of his faults.

His incompetence has run up a bill, which the rest of us will spend years paying off.  

(Written by Tom Cropper, Edited by Klaudia Fior)

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