Category Archives: Conflict of interest

Rishi Sunak is causing yet another conflict-of-interest – CORRUPTION – row

Akshata Murty and her husband, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak: it seems that, days after being forced to apologise for failing to declare that she (and therefore he) will benefit from one policy of the government he leads, he is trying to ensure that they will – corruptly? – benefit from another.

The UK prime minister who came into office promising “integrity, professionalism and accountability” is embroiled in yet another corruption/conflict-of-interest row involving his wife’s father’s multinational corporation, Infosys.

Rishi Sunak is trying to negotiate a free trade deal with India, where Infosys is based, and the allegation is that this will be hugely profitable for Infosys – and therefore, by proxy, for Sunak himself.

People are asking the obvious question:

Note that it is unlikely that the people of the UK will benefit from this free trade deal, according to Jemma Forte; Sunak is negotiating a deal to benefit his family – again.

Remember: Parliament’s Commissioner for Standards has only just stated that Sunak broke the Ministerial Code – “inadvertently” – by failing to declare that a childcare firm in which his wife has shares will benefit from a change in Tory government policy. In the current instance, there can be no such excuse as we have the evidence in advance of the deal.

Infosys is also a multiple offender in terms of preferential treatment from Sunak’s government. After war broke out between Russia and Ukraine, that firm was told to stop operating in Russia or face sanctions like all the other businesses then doing business with that state, but eight months later it was found still to be doing business there, with impunity against the UK’s sanctions regime.

Sunak is expected to attend a G20 summit in India in two weeks – and to discuss the trade deal at a separate, bilateral, meeting with that nation’s prime minister Narendra Modi.

But Keir Starmer’s opposition party (still currently known as Labour, for reasons unknown) has called for Sunak to make an open declaration about his wife’s financial interests in a company that could profit immensely from his involvement in these negotiations.

One expert – Professor Alan Manning of the London School of Economics, according to The Guardian, wants the prime minister to recuse himself from any negotiations.

In response, it seems the Foreign Office has warned the Labour-chaired business and trade select committee not to visit India to examine the issues around a potential deal. The government department is refusing to help committee members set up meetings with Indian officials and businesspeople.

It seems clear, then, that Sunak has something to hide once again – otherwise, why try to cover up what will happen at the negotiations?

The deal, it seems, will allow Infosys to send teams of its Indian employees to the UK to work on outsourced IT contracts for firms in this country.

Why not employ home-grown expertise and keep the contracts – and all the profits arising from them – in the UK? Or has previous Tory government policy ensured that nobody here has the required expertise any more?

Of course, the controversy will only intensify the debate over MPs having business interests outside the House of Commons, or receiving donations and/or gifts-in-kind from businesses or corporate bosses.

The question here is: who does Rishi Sunak work for – the people of the UK or his wife’s family firm?

The answer seems obvious – with the best interests of the nation he is supposed to lead coming a distant second.

Reform is urgently required – but with so many Parliamentarian snouts firmly in the trough, there seems to be no will to put a stop to the corporate influence that is staining all of us with the filth of corruption. How do we force an end to it?

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Sunak’s ‘inadvertent’ conflict of interest shows he is not fit to govern

Childcare shareholder Akshata Murty and her husband, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak: her firm should forgo any benefit from the new Tory policy, just to rid itself of the stain of corruption with which he has tarred it. And his serial “inadvertency” means he is not fit to govern.

Rishi Sunak and his government gets away with it – yet again.

I think this comment on the latest Tory corruption saga is highly relevant:

Yes, this is the story of how a new government policy, announced in the spring Budget, was geared to give huge amounts of money to a childcare company in which Rishi Sunak’s wife Akshata Murty has shares; he and his family would have benefited – but he did not declare it.

This is a breach of the Ministerial Code and an investigation was duly requested.

Now, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards has reported back – and said the failure to declare the conflict of interest was “inadvertent”. No further action will be taken.

In fairness, Sunak made a grovelling apology for failing to reveal that this government policy would make his family richer:

And the Prime Minister’s press secretary has said: “The commissioner’s investigation into the Prime Minister’s declaration of interest has been resolved by way of rectification. The Prime Minister takes seriously his responsibilities to register and declare all relevant interests.”

That’s all very well, but Sunak and his family are set to benefit from his omission to mention this interest, and that isn’t right. Nobody should use a position of power to feather their own nest.

So Ms Murty’s firm should be excluded from the list of those that are to benefit from this government policy – if only to rid itself (and the Tory government) of the stain of corruption with which Sunak has tarred it. Right?

Isn’t it odd that we don’t see that happening?

And it seems Sunak leads a government that is guilty of serial inadvertency:

That’s a lot of forgetfulness.

It encourages me to believe that none of these Tories are likely to remember important facts when they are needed – and this could cause serious harm to the UK and its people, given the seriousness of the crises we are currently being forced to endure.

By their own admission, Sunak and his party are not fit to govern.

People of Chipping Barnet: Theresa Villiers is the kind of MP you DON’T want

Theresa Villiers: she says her failure to declare £70,000 worth of shares in Shell was an “oversight”. Was it really, though? What else has she failed to share?

This is shocking: when she was the government member charged with caring for our environment, Theresa Villiers had £70,000 worth of shares in mass-polluter Shell oil.

She is the MP for Chipping Barnet, where constituents should be outraged that she has been working for the enrichment of that firm (and therefore increased profits for herself) rather than in their interests.

That firm recently announced profits of $5 billion (US), which is admittedly down from the £7.7 billion (UK) it made in the first quarter of 2023. Of that, £6 billion found its way into the bank accounts of shareholders like Ms Villiers.

Shell stock is currently worth around £24 – higher than the £19.41 when Ms Villiers left office as Environment Secretary, so she’s making a bit of a killing.

She says her failure to declare this enormous conflict of interest was an oversight that won’t happen again:

The only reason it won’t happen again is that she has been caught red-handed and knows she can’t hide this any more.

What else has she been hiding, though?

It seems clear that there is only one way to keep this woman from lying – call it what it is – about business interests that create conflicts with her duty to the nation.

That is to ensure that she cannot have a job in which such conflicts arise.

If Ms Villiers is more interested in making money for herself than in safeguarding the interests and well-being of the United Kingdom as a whole, then she should be forced back into the private sector.

No doubt she’ll quickly find work with a firm that has profited from UK government policy.

She might do well by sending her CV to Shell.

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Is this the secret reason Rishi Sunak announced 100 oil and gas contracts in a global warming crisis?

Rishi Sunak: the face of naked Tory avarice.

It should come as no surprise to anybody that the oil and gas contracts Rishi Sunak announced in the middle of a global boiling crisis come with a suggestion of corruption.

Remember Infosys, the firm owned by Sunak’s father-in-law, in which his wife Akshata Murty has 38.9 million shares? The information on my screen says they’re estimated to be worth £89 million but that is likely to increase hugely now.

You see, Infosys has just “won” (it says here) a $1.5 billion contract with BP – one of the energy firms that will profit from those North Sea oil and gas contracts. People are suggesting that there’s something fishy about it all, and it isn’t just the water:

Now, with Infosys having secured its deal and having now done his deal, Sunak is off on his holibobs – apparently his first in four years:

You may not be aware of this, but Sunak recently launched what’s he’s calling a Business Council, allegedly to “turbocharge economic growth”.

Here’s a bit of information about it:

Infosys already has ties with Shell, as part of a partnership with “two of the top five integrated oil and gas companies, three of the top four oilfield services providers, and five of the top 10 upstream enterprises across the oil and gas landscape”:

The Byline Times article – from July 19 last year – warned us about Sunak’s ties with the fossil fuel industry:

Infosys’ intimate partnerships with regional as well as global oil and gas giants represent a potential conflict of interest for Rishi Sunak.

According to the UK Ministerial Code, ministers are required to fully disclose and explain the business interests of their spouses and families “which might give rise to a conflict” with the duties of Government.

Despite Sunak ostensibly committing to the Government’s net zero goals – now deemed unlawful by the High Court for not going far enough – he also said in the televised debate … that Britain must not move “too hard and too fast” on climate action.

His victory [in the Conservative leadership contest that was ongoing at the time] could represent a win for firms like Shell, which said it expected to revise upwards the value of oil and gas assets it had previously written down, triggering a jump in share prices.

When Sunak eventually released a list of his business interests – correct me if I’m wrong – the connections between his wife’s family firm and the oil companies that have just won very large and valuable contracts were not mentioned.

Scottish news organisation The National has also – just – published a list of fossil fuel polluters and climate change deniers that donate money to the Conservative Party. Have some of these won contracts in Sunak’s recent bonanza?

Taking it in the round, it seems unlikely that Sunak had the interests of the eco-system in mind when he was considering the possibility of new oil and gas contracts in the North Sea.

Indeed, it seems unlikely that he considered the well-being of anything other than his own financial affairs and those of his family.

It seems to This Writer that this entire situation – the contracts, the Business Council, the donations to the Tory Party – requires scrutiny, and by somebody entirely independent of Sunak and his Tories.

Can anybody recommend a mechanism by which this can be secured?

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Tory conflict-of-interest watch: health minister’s wife gets NHS health contracts

Neil O’Brien: why has he been allowed to work in a government department that hands out contracts to his wife’s firm?

Here’s another Tory conflict of interest – and it’s nepotism again, too.

Like prime minister Rishi Sunak, the Conservative minister for Primary Health Care – Neil O’Brien – is married to a woman with an interest in a private firm that receives government contracts.

His wife Jemma is GP engagement lead at Circle Health, which receives public money from the Tories to perform operations at its 54 private hospitals (Circle was the first private health firm to take over an NHS hospital).

 

What is this man doing in a government department that may hand contracts to a company where his wife works?

It’s a clear conflict of interest.

And it’s actually a miracle that we’ve found out about it from the new MPs’ register of interests, that has attracted ridicule for failing to list all of the businesses that are at least part-owned by Sunak’s wife Akshata Murty.

From the Mirror article:

Mr Sunak has been accused of a “complete lack of transparency” over his own wife’s investments.

The list of interests did not include details of the shareholdings owned by his heiress wife, Akshata Murty.

Under the section for relevant interests held by a spouse or close relative, Mr Sunak’s entry included his wife’s venture capital company Catamaran Ventures and unnamed “direct shareholdings”.

A footnote adds that these include her “minority shareholding” in Koru Kids, but no details were given for any of her other shareholdings.

Farcically, the list did not include her £468million stake in Infosys, the Indian IT firm founded by her billionaire father.

And Infosys get government contracts, of course.

Corrupt?

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Latest row over Sunak’s wife shows his new declaration of interests is worthless

Akshata Murty and her husband, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak: he has taken extraordinary steps to hide any commercial interests either of them have from the electorate. We must therefore conclude that he may be dishonestly using his position to funnel public money into his bank accounts and hers.

The row over whether Rishi Sunak’s wife benefited from the work that went into an ’emergency alert’ test affecting mobile phones on Sunday (April 23) shows one thing: the public do not believe the prime minister’s latest declaration of interests.

Sunak published a new register of MPs’ financial interests last week, in response to anger over his failure to declare that a company part-owned by Akshata Murty will benefit from a new policy to attract people into child-minding.

It doesn’t include significant details, either of his own personal financial investments or his wife’s.

Some of us have drawn the obvious conclusion: that Sunak thinks he and his wife are above such declarations – even though he takes public money, the same as the lowliest Universal Credit claimant.

And UC claimants have to declare their partners’ financial interests:

He didn’t even bother to turn up to an Urgent Question demanding a statement on his entry in the register, on the day the stink over alleged interest in the “emergency alert” broke out across the social media:

Instead, one of his lieutenants piped up to say it’s unreasonable to demand of the prime minister what his government demands of every benefit claimant. This confirms that Sunak thinks he’s better than the rest of us and doesn’t need to give an account of himself.

Apparently Sunak’s entry on the register includes his local rotary club, brass band and community pub but not any business interests owned by him or his wife.

The Byline Times article states:

A spokesperson for Sunak insisted that only such declarations judged to be “relevant” had been added to the list.

This means that while, according to Sunak, the fact the he is a patron of his local brass band is judged to be a “relevant” interest relating to his role as Prime Minister, the fact that his wife is now set to potentially massively financially benefit from a Government policy, is not.

Also not included in the new register are any of the Prime Minister’s own personal financial interests, save from the fact that they are now contained within what Downing Street refer to as a “blind management trust”.

This arrangement is ostensibly designed to prevent the Prime Minister from personally being involved in any future investment decisions that may be affected by his own policies.

However, by placing his existing investments within this “blind” arrangement, the public are prevented from ever knowing which Government policies are directly enriching the Prime Minister and his family.

It is hard to think of a reasonable justification for this continued refusal to be fully open about his own financial interests and those of his wife.

It is clear that Rishi Sunak is doing everything he can to prevent the rest of us from knowing how many commercial pies he and his wife have stuck their grubby fingers into.

It is dishonesty at the top level of government. No wonder he is currently being investigated over whether he has approved a policy that funnels money to a company part-owned by his wife. Other government contracts with companies owned by her should also be investigated.

The dishonesty implied by any investigation is exactly the opposite of what Sunak himself promised when he became prime minister.

By his own standards, he does not deserve to remain in office. There’s a local election next week in England and Northern Ireland; I hope voters there use it to drive that point home.

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Were you alarmed by the ’emergency alert’ test? Either way, this might trouble you

Alert: apparently the contract for the smartphone test that happened yesterday (April 23, 2023) was given to Fujitsu, the firm that bungled the Horizon Post Office software – and which immediately sub-contracted it to Infosys, the firm run by UK prime minister Rishi Sunak’s father-in-law, in which his wife holds millions of pounds worth of shares. Conflict of interest?

It seems the test of the ’emergency alert’ signal on everybody’s smartphone may be another example of Tory nepotism and corruption.

Here’s how:

The contract certainly went to Fujitsu – I have found articles here and here supporting that claim.

I have yet to find proof that it was sub-contracted to Infosys, although it is certainly true that the company owned by UK prime minister Rishi Sunak’s father-in-law, in which his wife holds millions of pounds worth of shares, has worked on other such systems in the past. If anybody can confirm or deny the claim, This Site would like to hear about it.

The Cabinet Office has been contacted for comment.

If it is the case, then I cannot recall Sunak ever declaring this interest when the contract was handed out. At a time when he is under investigation for failing to declare his interest in another government contract handed out to one of his wife’s companies… might this be damaging for him?

ADDITIONAL: A Government spokesperson said: “This is completely untrue – there are no connections with Infosys in the running of the Emergency Alerts system.”

More information to follow in an article later.

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Sunak’s caginess over his wife’s shares is suspicious – because of what they’ve done

Akshata Murty and her husband, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak: it is hard to believe their actions have been entirely innocent.

There’s a lot of “nothing to see here, guv” about the way the government – and Rishi Sunak in particular – has handled the controversy over it handing public money to firms in which his wife holds shares.

After it was found that Akshata Murty had shares in Koru Kids, a childcare agency set to benefit from a policy in last month’s budget, Sunak has published a new list of his own financial interests including it. It seems to have been omitted previously.

We have also heard that the government has awarded a contract to her father’s firm Infosys, in which she also has shares. This business was found to be operating in Russia after the government imposed sanctions on any commercial operation doing so, and its bosses promised to withdraw from that country after the transgression was discovered.

It was subsequently revealed that Infosys had not withdrawn from Russia immediately – but Sunak’s government gave it a contract worth a small fortune anyway.

So that’s two infringements – of government policy and Parliamentary rules – in favour of Rishi Sunak’s wife.

Before either of them, we learned that Ms Murty had avoided paying £20 million in taxes by holding non-domiciled tax status. This created a huge stink as she was understood to be living in the prime minister’s Downing Street flat with him – a tax avoider living in the heart of government.

There were calls for Sunak to be removed as prime minister over it.

But then Ms Murty agreed to give up her non-dom status and start paying the full amount of UK taxes.

That leads to the very obvious question posed in the second of the two tweets below:

“If Rishi Sunak’s wife is suddenly prepared to hand over several million to keep her husband in a £150k job… you really need to think about why this might be.”

Yes, indeed.

The logical inference from it all is that he has been using his position in that job to funnel huge amounts of cash into private firms in which his wife has an interest. Do we even know if he has declared all her shareholdings now?

Public opinion seems clear:

It is all speculation. But the facts on which it is based are irrefutable.

Akshata Murty did give up her non-dom status and agree to pay millions of pounds in tax, in order to ensure her husband stayed in his £150k-per-year job.

And Rishi Sunak’s government did hand large amounts of money to private businesses in which his wife had shares.

It’s extremely hard to see any of it as innocent.

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Murty’s meltdown? Firm connected to PM’s wife loses millions

Akshata Murty and her husband, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak: has she been using her connection with a leading UK politician to gain advantages for her firms? Is she now losing support after Sunak fell under investigation for a possible conflict of interest? Or is it all just coincidental?

A firm connected to Rishi Sunak’s wife Akshata Murty has lost a fortune on the stock exchange.

The losses are being reported on the day an investigation was launched into whether Sunak failed to correctly report a conflict of interest; Ms Murty is a shareholder in a firm that will profit from a Budget incentive to recruit childminders.

It seems another of her investments that made the headlines because of government policy has taken a major loss on the stock market.

Remember Infosys, the company that carried on trading in Russia after the government sanctioned such firms?

Infosys claimed in April last year that it was closing its office in Russia – providing a lucky escape for the then-Chancellor, who had refused to take any action about the company’s continued commercial interest in a country that the UK should have been shunning.

Then – exactly a month ago – we discovered that Infosys was still operating in Russia, eight months after it said it would withdraw, and had been given a £1.8 million government contract in spite of this.

Now:

So her shares, which were worth £400 million this morning, are now worth £351 million – in a company for which, like Koru Kids, Sunak broke – or at least seriously bent – government rules.

Had she been using her connection with a leading UK politician to gain advantages for her firms? Is she now losing support after Sunak fell under investigation for a possible conflict of interest?

Or is it a coincidence? It will be interesting to find out.

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Rishi Sunak investigated by standards commissioner over childcare conflict of interest

Partners in (the) climb: Akshata Murty and her husband, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak.

UK prime minister Rishi Sunak is facing investigation over whether he properly declared his wife’s interest in a childcare agency that may benefit from a new policy announced in the spring Budget.

Sunak’s wife Akshata Murty is listed as a shareholder in Koru Kids, a childcare agency that is likely to benefit from a pilot scheme offered by Jeremy Hunt to incentivise people to become childminders, with £1,200 offered to those who train to become one through an agency.

It is believed that he is being investigated over whether a declaration of interest in this organisation was “open and frank”, under rules set out by the commissioner for standards.

This Site has discussed the situation previously, here. It seems the authorities got around the question of Sunak having to grant permission to be investigated by the independent adviser on ministerial interests (Laurie Magnus) by handing it to the standards commissioner (Daniel Greenberg).

This Writer doubts the investigation will lead to any great censure of Sunak.

The initiative to encourage people to become childminders may very well benefit children and carers alike – because it is calculated to bring more people into the job market, which is what the Tories want.

Ms Murty is not the only business boss who will benefit from it, and indeed Koru Kids is not her only business interest, so it can hardly be argued that the policy was introduced purely as a money-spinner for the prime minister and his family.

Still, he did fail to declare his interest to the Commons Liaison committee when asked, and not only should he be made to apologise and correct the record, but he should also take steps to ensure that every other government minister knows they have an obligation to list their own interests correctly, at appropriate times.

But what will happen next? Keep watching this space…

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