 Hello, welcome to this week's downstream. My name is Aaron Verstine. Before we go any further, a few bits of housekeeping. One thing, like the video. Secondly, if you've not already and if you haven't, what's going on? Subscribe to the channel. Subscribe to the Navarro media. Help us reach an even bigger audience than we do already. Right. The green sale scandal seems to get bigger every day. For no other reason than it seems to raise important questions about standards in public life, with many feeling that none less than a former Prime Minister, David Cameron, fell massively short. With me to discuss the story of Lex Greensill and David Cameron as Sunday Times journalist and author of Left Out, Gabriel Pogrand. Gabriel, welcome to downstream. Thanks. I'm going to start right from the top here, Gabriel. A lot of people watching this, I'm sure, are familiar with the words green sale. They might know that David Cameron has something to do with this story. Can you just provide a quick outline? What has happened here? Why is this a scandal? We hear the word scandal all the time. Why is this actually something people should care about? So let's just zoom out and start at the beginning. Lex Greensill is the son of watermelon and sugar cane farmers from Bundaberg in northeast Australia. He came to Britain as a 20-something and he joined a bank, a Wall Street bank called JP Morgan, and quickly started becoming an evangelist for a financial product which he claimed he had a lot of personal affinity to. It's called supply chain finance. Now, what this involves is a bank inserting itself in a supply chain between a business and a customer that business is awaiting payment. Sometimes the customer takes a while to pay, especially if you're, say, a farmer awaiting payment from supermarket. So you get a bank involved in the middle and the bank pays the business. And then when the customer gets the money in due course, it reimburses the bank which takes a fee along the way. And Greensill said that he had always been inspired by this form of financial engineering because as a youngster, he'd been forced to study law by correspondence because his parents fell foul of a late and bad harvest and never got the payment they needed on time from supermarkets and he wasn't able to get the education he wanted. So nobody asked for the biography of this financial you've never heard of. What you want to know is why this matters. And the answer is that in 2011, a man called Jeremy Hayward, he was the right-hand man of prime ministers ranging from Blair to Brown to May to Cameron, parachuted this man called Lex Greensill into the heart of Whitehall without quite stating why and gave him unfettered access to 11th government departmental agencies ranging from the Ministry of Defense to the Department of Health to the Treasury. And he spent this period pitching all of these ideas and schemes and quite who benefited from them was unclear. Greensill had moved from JP Morgan by this point to a bank called Citigroup and then in 2011, just after he'd been parachuted into Whitehall as a so-called supply chain finance advisor, he founded his own company called Greensill Capital specializing in this same product. And a year later, David Cameron announced this big supply chain finance scheme to help get payment to NHS affiliated pharmacies. He was sat in Downing Street where he announced it two seats away from Lex Greensill and the small print at the time was non-existent. It's only subsequently we've established that the scheme was carried out by none other than Greensill's former employer, Citigroup, who by the way at the time of his entry into Whitehall, he was still working for. He even used his Citigroup email address. And then a few years later, after this initial contract was handed out without tender, it went to dot, dot, dot, you guessed it, Greensill Capital. So that in and of itself raises some searching questions about governance in our country and the way the civil service works. But the story gets bigger still because over the years that followed, Greensill became closer and closer to the political establishment. He got a CBE for services to the economy. He was made a crown representative, making him an official business advisor to the British state. And then in 2016, after David Cameron left office, the pair remained friends. And two years later, he in fact appointed David Cameron as an advisor to the company. And the subject of my story for the last month, and those are the financial times we've kind of been acting in tandem, has been what Cameron did on behalf of Greensill. So the financial times about a month ago disclosed that David Cameron had lobbied the Treasury in number 10 for Greensill's company, Greensill Capital, to get access to numerous COVID emergency recovery schemes. Then I revealed that he'd in fact personally texted Rishi, soon after those texts, or at least Rishi's response has since been disclosed by the Treasury. And on Sunday, I disclosed that Cameron in fact directly lobbied Matt Hancock for a separate proposal by Greensill to once again insert himself between the NHS and its suppliers, or rather he wanted to use, he wanted to roll out a payroll service across the entire NHS. And he frankly almost got there. And just to finish off, I don't want to spiel for too long, but the reason why this has become interesting and the reason why the government has in fact now launched an inquiry into this is twofold. Number one, Greensill got Cameron got caught, which kind of makes this different probably to the vast majority of lobbying which takes place in our country. And number two, Greensill was not only enriching himself, but rather it transpires his business was built on some pretty toxic and irresponsible financial practices. And it was last month that Greensill filed for administration, which has imperiled 55,000 jobs across the world, including 5,000 in Britain, most of them in the steel sector because of Greensill symbiotic relationship with a Indian born British steel magnet called Sanjeev Gupta. And that, I'm going to say before taking a sip of my water, I think is that for the moment. That was an excellent introduction, Gabriel. Thanks very much. I once was briefly, and I hadn't really put this in the script beforehand, but the role of Jeremy Hayward, you know, this was somebody who was spoken about in the highest possible terms in terms of public life and so on. He sadly, sadly passed away since. What's his role here? Because of course, in 2010-2011, Greensill is only, what, 34 years old? It's remarkable that he inserts himself right at the heart of the Downing Street operation like this. Was that being pushed by Jeremy Hayward? Or are there any sort of, is there any evidence to suggest where this was coming from? Why he got these advantages? Yeah, you know, I think it's important to kind of be thoughtful and evidence-led and how we reflect on this. And it is certainly true that the latter phase of the scandal is about the conduct of conservative ministers. But actually, this is equally fascinating from the perspective of the enfeeblement or the degradation of the civil service is absolutely the case that Jeremy Hayward was the guy that brought him in to Whitehall. And something I didn't mention in my initial roundup of what's happened so far is that Hayward had in fact met Greensill during his stint at JP Morgan. Hayward had got his fingers burnt because of the Iraq war. He was Blair's PPS and it transpired that he hadn't taken notes from some vital meetings in the run up to the invasion. And off the back of that, he went and spent a few years making a lot of money at JP Morgan, where he came across supply chain finance, and in turn, this young buck, this 20-something Antipodean financier called Let's Greensill. And on his way back, he brought him in. So we're definitely a question to ask about Jeremy Hayward, who as you know, it's been lionized as the greatest civil service generation. And I mean, you also asked about evidence. I'm just going to look at my phone right now and read you an email which I was leaked, which I've since reproduced in the Sunday times. But for those of your listeners who aren't subscribers, I might just read it out because it's pretty fascinating. This basically is the email which Hayward himself sent asking his colleagues to work with this guy. And it reads as follows. He says that it is a... I'm not going to read the name of the people he sent it to, but he says, Lex and I have been working on this stuff for five years on and off. It is a huge frustration that HMG, Her Majesty's government, continues to leave free money on the table in this way. I'm delighted that you are now engaging with him. He's quite keen to set the links with Citigroup and come work for us as a part-time specialist advisor on supply chain finance. I hope we can seriously consider this. I think you can have the same governing effect on this area as Tim Kessley has had on transparency in brackets. Amazing that he says this because it was never declared internally or externally that Greensill was working there. But moving beyond the meta commentary, I'll just finish this off. In the space of six months, Hayward says, I'm sure he could deliver a step change in our understanding of the opportunities here and he would be prepared to work for a minimal sum. On the issues in this presentation, it would help. If it would help, I would be prepared to have a session with the Department of Health and the Ministry of Defense, et cetera, before he sees Francis. That's Francis Maud, the minister responsible. Equally happy to leave this to you, but really do not want this opportunity to pass by. There's a little bit more, but I'll spare you the detail. That last bit basically is him saying, why don't we just set up some meetings before the minister's responsible get involved, which again, notwithstanding your feelings about Tory ministers, we obviously don't want a civil service which can bring in colleagues or former colleagues from the city without democratically appointed ministers having oversight of it. That's the direct answer to your direct question about Hayward. That's a remarkable point. That email was sent in 2011? Not even. It was actually earlier 2010. At the time, Hayward was number 10 permanent secretary, which was a special role created for him. He was just about to become cabinet secretary, so the most senior official in the land, the de facto head of the British civil service. Briefly say something as well, which I think you'll be quite interested in is the fact that I've also been leaked a number of emails and letters from Citibank itself months before Greensill was anywhere near Whitehall in which they lobbied for the NHS scheme, which they themselves went on to run after Greensill had engineered for them to do so. This is obviously complex. Supply chain finance ain't a sexy collection of words, but this is incredible stuff. You've got a letter from the CEO of Citigroup expressly saying we want to do this. A few months later, Lex.Greensill at citigroup.com is being CC'd into emails with the top civil servant in Britain. Within a year, he's rolled out a scheme without any contract or tender using a secret agreement between the bank and the Treasury to gift this scheme, which he basically came up with to his former colleague. He's saying that they met in 2005 or he's been working with him on this as a subject for five years. What was the context of that? Was he also in the private sector at that time? Was he at a particular bank or when did he come back into the civil service? So Hayward came back into civil service in 2008 to help Gordon Brown manage the financial crisis, but he'd met Greensill when they were both working at JP Morgan, and then Greensill had gone on to work for Citigroup. Hayward had gone back to civil service, and by 2010, Hayward's saying, when I get that hot shot with all those big ideas about supply chain finance into government, so we can pitch some of his ideas directly to departments. Does that make sense? I know it's quite complex. No, no, it makes perfect sense, because what's interesting to me is that hearing some of the response to this, and it's a perfectly understandable response, and we'll talk about it shortly, is that people are saying, yes, this is about politicians, but it's also about civil servants who lead the civil service and then can impact political decision-making through lobbying. What you're saying is actually, kind of, you want to invert that. This is about somebody who's been in the civil service, been in the private sector, and then all of a sudden, it's quite frankly undermining the expected standards of privacy in the civil service by fast-tracking somebody like Greensill who shouldn't be there. Is that right? I mean, yeah, Jeremy Hayward, who was a prolific chain smoker and very sadly died of cancer three years ago, is said by friends to have had a second weakness, which was he was kind of easily taken in by financiers with whizzy ideas. I mean, he, and certainly many people who loved him, it's not really for me to pass opinion on the guy per se, it's kind of before my time with journalism, but I mean, he certainly saw himself as Mr. Ideas, Mr. Yes, you know, he wasn't Sir Humphrey. He was the guy who went asked to do something in the environment, so we'd say, actually, I'm not going to frustrate you, I'm going to give effect to your will using my intellectual imagination. And that gave rise to this desire to bring people in with interesting ideas from the private sector. And so, yeah, let's just free ourselves from the template of these scandals as always being Tory minister bullying civil servants into doing something. This was the case of civil servants feeding Greensill into the hands of ministers, many of whom were actually highly reluctant. Cameron, and in the end was seduced by him. And then, you know, more latterly, because of Hancock and Richie and Cameron, it does become much more kind of party political rather than political with a small P. Yeah, so yesterday, Johnson announced that there had been an investigation. Was that expected? And is there a suspicion that he might be throwing Cameron's The Wolves, you know, these famous Tory frenemies of the last 15 years, really? What's your take on that? Because it does seem a remarkably swift response from Downing Street. I mean, it wasn't it wasn't, you know, I mean, a lot of this was revealed about five, four weeks ago. And I think since then, there's just been a drip, drip of stories. And I get the impression that Downing Street kind of wanted to quarterize the wound. I mean, there's they wanted to catch this in some way. Who knows, maybe they also thought, you know, it's not often that we're particularly generous about the sincerity of people's motives, maybe they genuinely thought it required answering. And I'm sure, you know, there's definitely a mood of it can happen to a nicer guy. When in relation to Cameron, I mean, you know, they're all delighted that Cameron is in the thick of this right now, because of the kind of boat leave slash Eaton slash Oxford slash CCHQ psycho drama. So, you know, why do they do it? I don't know. There are kind of interesting questions about the scope and power of this inquiry. It's run by a man called Nigel Boardman, who's a former lawyer at Slaughter in May, has a role as a non executive director at a government department. Labour's already saying that he can't the government can't market his own homework. Boris Johnson today has responded by saying that this man will have a carte blanche to investigate it all. But I'm pretty sure, you know, that they knew that this was going to run and run. And it asks, it's almost, it reminds me of Wirecard or something and how many, this is such a multi headed monster of a story, you know, it asks questions of the civil service, the political establishment, the auditors, the big banks, the insurers, criminal and criminal authorities, financial regulators in various different countries. I mean, it's a really big story. I think the Cameron and supply chain finance dimension of it is just the political establishment's world of probably trying to extinguish the flame right now, but it's not going anywhere. Yeah, in terms of the labour response, they described the probe that was launched by Johnson as quite having all the hallmarks of a conservative cover-up. Do you think that's a fair assessment? I mean, you sort of touched upon that, but I mean, there's a pretty strong words from a labour front bench, which we know, you know, it pulls its punches generally speaking when it's talking to the Tories. It's not, it's not Corbyn-esque, shall we say. So do you think they mean that? Do you think the belief among labour is that this is a big political story, besides all the other stuff you just said? I think that they, I mean, I think that they detect that this could be a repeat of what happened with Pretty Patel, where the government commissions a inquiry in something and then sits on it. I mean, we still haven't seen that report, by the way. I think it was Sebastian Payne at the Financial Times and Laura Koonsberg, who said they understood what the outcome had been. And then I think we got a letter from somebody saying the broad outcomes of it, but we've not seen the detail. And I don't think that would be acceptable in this instance. And I think Labour are trying to preempt that by probably ratcheting up the pressure early to make sure that this is a proper inquiry. It's not my job to just, on a knee-jerk basis, de-legitimize or defame people who might be perfectly eminent. I mean, this guy was a senior partner at Slaughter and May, a magic circle firm. I'm sure he's got a big brain and, you know, he's a solicitor. I'm sure he's a man of reasonable integrity. It's more just about what he is actually allowed to ask. And Boris Johnson said he had a car launch to ask questions, but does that mean that he can get answers? You know, does he have the legal power of requisition material from vital departments at this moment? I actually don't know. That's an important point. So I suppose, let's talk about, we talked about Cameron, let's talk about Sunak. Where do you think he sits in all of this? Because, of course, like you said, there's also questions around Matt Hancock and Rishi Sunak. Do you think that the fact that you had the responses submitted by the Treasury, do you think he feels that there's sufficient distance between him and Cameron? Or do you think the more we learn about this story, the more implicated, not necessarily Rishi Sunak, but other political actors will become? Now, as we know so far, kind of criticism has been water for ducks back for Rishi Sunak. I think this could still go awkward for him. I mean, arguably, in a quite laudable way, he took the decision to publish his text responses to David Cameron and also published a load of internal correspondence about Cameron's lobbying of the Treasury, which just from my personal experience, you know, is not particularly straightforward occurrence. I mean, even Financial Times's investigative reporter made a note of the fact that this was one of the most rapid disclosures of key government information that she could remember, Cynthia O. Murphy, that is. And I mean, I have to say, I think that having then got on the front foot, he has deflected criticism so far. But if you look at the letter of what's come out, I mean, it is only now that the whole political world is coming alive to this. But, you know, you thought supply chain finance wasn't particularly glamorous a term. I'm now going to invoke the acronym of the CCFF, the COVID Corporate Financing Facility. This was this big government scheme to loan, as it happened in the end, £37 billion to blue chip companies, big kind of FTSE 100 companies that the Treasury felt at the outset of the pandemic were too big to fail. Greens all came along and said, I want to be involved in CCFF, but I want to be an accredited lender to loan to small and medium-sized businesses. This was in March. The Treasury said, what the hell are you talking about? You're a FinTech company and you don't small businesses. This is an entirely different scheme about big companies like we're talking, you know, manufacturers, supermarkets, tech companies, whatever it might be, it has nothing to do with, you know, individual-owned businesses or whatever it might be. But Greens all kind of brazenly said, no, no, let's redesign it so I can loan money as an intermediary to small businesses across the country. The Treasury said no. On the day that the Treasury said no, Cameron calls and texts to Rishi Sunak and writes to Sharon Westlake, Boris Johnson Senior Special Advisor with the brief involving business and says, quoting the Westlake you die now, it would be nuts, nuts to exclude Greensill. He says, what we need is for Rishi to get officials to reconsider. Wow. Which is exactly what happened. So the Treasury then embarked on a two-and-a-half-month exercise. It reexamined where the Greensill, in fact, could be baked into the cake of the CCFF. A market notice had already been disseminated. That means a legal notice had already been put out explaining the terms and conditions of the scheme. And the Treasury basically said, let's find a way where we could potentially tweak this view, Lax, just without having to change the kind of core legal constraints of it. And these weren't, by the way, kind of civil service fast streamers who just graduated from Bristol Oxford. This was Tom Scoller, the permanent secretary of the Treasury, and Charles Roxberg, the second per se, aka the two most powerful people at the Treasury who are engaging in daily and sometimes, even within an hour, several email exchanges with Greensill himself. This is at the time when Boris Johnson was in intensive care, as in literally they were emailing in that period of time. And as the Treasury was controlling the purse strings of the country in its biggest post-war crisis. So I will say, I'm going to fast forward two-and-a-half months, the government in the end did not admit Greensill to the CCFF. But what it did do is it gave them a head of a lot of face time with the most powerful people in the Treasury in the meantime. And it did eventually, though the Treasury has kind of tried to distance itself from this decision, Greensill did become an accredited lender under a different scheme, the CLBills, the coronavirus large business interruption scheme. And under that, it was able to loan £400 million to the allegedly fraudulent steel tycoon, Sanjeev Gupta. And what were Greensill's finances like in March last year? For him to be having these conversations with Treasury officials, I mean, do we now know in retrospect that actually, it seems kind of almost inexplicable that somebody experienced in the problems he did, was engaged in that kind of behaviour. Did he see a major downturn in his sort of commercial fortunes months afterwards, or was it already in play by then? Yeah, there are some people, I think it's now been said in Hansard. So I think I got some legal comfort in saying here that some people think that Greensill Capital was a Ponzi scheme, and he effectively needed more capital to loan to Gupta in order for his own business to survive. Like he could only get money from investors on the basis of having this large and impressive portfolio of interest in the steel sector. And so he needed more and more and more. And he went to the government because he saw a source of cheap, potentially incredibly dependable capital. Let's not forget, in the event that he loaned to Gupta under the CL Bill scheme, and Gupta was unable to pay him back, the government would cover 80% of that £400 million, which, by the way, was five times the ordinary amount for most other lenders. So he managed to gain and sidestep the rules in some way or another. But your question was about the company's finances. I mean, it was only last month that Greensill filed for administration. And it is only kind of more recently, thanks to the efforts of the FT, that we know the real toxic structure upon which this company did business, which was, you know, we were talking about supply chain finance before this way in which banks kind of pay businesses up front and then recoup the money from customers later on. And Greensill was doing some pretty wacky stuff with this. He was firstly providing up front payment to Gupta for consignments of steel, which were allegedly coming down the track in three years, which is quite a silly thing to do when it comes to commodities, because their price is so volatile, you would never provide like, I would never give you £500 now for the promise of steel in three years. But that's what was happening. And then, I mean, most scandalously, it has been alleged that some of these future transactions were done with clients who say they've never done any business with Sanjeev Gupta. They know who he is. They've never worked with him. And then in addition to that, and this kind of has echoes of the subprime crisis, let's Greensill bundled up these future payments from Sanjeev Gupta's clients, that he called them future receivables. He collateralized them and then he sold them on capital markets in order to make money. And somehow, despite the apparent risk of a lot of these future payments, various big insurers and banks, including Credit Suisse, insured these loans, which made it quite risk-free from an investor's point of view. So, it's an incredible story really. And allegations of fraud, German prosecutors have launched criminal action against Greensill there. So, I mean, yeah, whether the government should have been doing business with this kind of company or involving it in the heart of one of its schemes seems pretty unlikely. And it was only last week when the Treasury released this information that we learned that in October, last year, the British business bank, which carried out the CL Bill scheme, had opened an investigation into Greensill over its apparent violation of the rules of the program. So, the collateralization of this stuff is, obviously, like you say, it has huge echoes of the 2008 crisis. What was Greensill doing back before 2010 in that world? Did he have a particular, I mean, you talked about supply chain finance, but was he sort of OFA with collateralization, you know, CDOs, CLOs, because, of course, they became the kind of totemic part of the financial services industry, which people say, well, that's why things went so badly wrong. Was he, was he quite immersed in that world? It's an interesting question. I mean, he was the managing, he was a managing director of Citigroup. And on his email signature and emails, I mean, it says MD Citigroup supply chain finance, EMEA here at Middle East Africa. So he was basically a big knob at Citigroup specializing in supply chain finance, which, by the way, quite contrary to what you've just been outlining, was meant to be and ordinarily is a pretty low risk form of investment. I mean, what effectively it involves is, I mean, it's actually pretty simple when you think about it. It's just a bank saying to somebody, I'll give you your money upfront, so you don't have to wait three weeks for your customer to pay you. When your customer pays you, I get that money plus 1% or something. Well, I take a bit of your money when I pay you initially. It should be pretty simple. It's just about accelerating the payment by a few days or weeks. But it's when you enter the collateralization of this stuff, and when the payments that are allegedly coming in a few days or weeks may never have even been placed or more over maybe years down the line, then it starts to become pretty toxic and pretty opaque. And I've been given pitch books, which Citigroup, or rather Credit Suisse rather, handed out to clients, kind of evangelizing Green Seal services. And to seasoned people in the financial world, you could see this stuff and see from a mile off that there's something wrong going on over here because you can't tell what these collateralized loans are actually made up of. And they seem to be pretty risky. Can you tell our audience about the Bill Crowder's story, which was broken by the FT earlier today? That's a very unfair question, perhaps, because that's the FT story, and it's only in the last 24 hours. But please, yeah, because that seems like a new layer to add. Yeah, it's not unfair. And actually, I mean, this is like kind of embarrassing fleet street competition stuff. I mean, the FT, as I've been repeatedly crediting them, have been doing amazing work. This was actually just uploaded onto the government earlier today. So this is just a release by ACOBA, the advisory committee on, let's get the full acronym, we want our Navarro listeners to be literate in these things, the advisory committee on business appointments. So ACOBA has just released this correspondence from the Cabinet Office who has confirmed that Bill Crowder's, who was the former head of the Crown Commercial Service, this means he was in charge of government procurement, he had a control over a 64 billion pound budget a year. Suddenly, at times, all these elite emails, by the way, showing that Bill Crowder was intimately involved in introducing Greensill to commercial directors of Whitehall departments during his time in government, Crowder's and Greensill kind of worked pretty closely together during this time. It is known already that after leaving Whitehall, as the most senior procurement official in the land, that Crowder's went on to be a director of Greensill Capital, what nobody knew, what has now been disclosed, and I mean, I don't know, I don't want to use hyperbole, let's just say if I could convey in words the sentiment behind the head exploding emoji, that's what I would do now. It transpires that Crowder's, in fact, was an advisor to Greensill, he joined an advisory board of Greensill Capital whilst the head of the government of the Crown Commercial Service. So he literally did them at once. It's not like oh the revolving door, that's been one thing out the other. He was wearing both hats at once. And I know, as the FT knows, and anybody who studied this knows, that Crowder's was integral in engineering Greensill's initial pharmacy scheme, from which he managed to process billions and billions of payments between the NHS and individually owned pharmacists around the country. And he was lobbying intensively when trying to persuade Matt Hancock to introduce his payroll scheme during the pandemic, which was a subject of our story recently. So this is pretty crazy. I mean, I don't think I've, I mean, actually, I had a story a couple of months ago, which I kind of personally thought should have got more pickup that nobody seemed to care about for whatever reason, which was that Sir Edward Lister, Boris Johnson's chief strategic advisor, was on the advisory board of a commercial property company throughout his time in number 10. He now borrows his advisor to the Gulf. And nobody really seemed to mind, but anyway, there's a lot of love and a lot of interest and focus on this story right now. And some big old questions are being asked about how it was that somebody who was a very senior civil servant could possibly have done this during the coalition government. I mean, there's two questions here. So presumably Bill Crowder knew that that wasn't really, was it permissible or is it just inadvisable? And then secondly, by extension, obviously, there are the certain oversight of this. Did nobody pick this up? Or did somebody pick it up and think this isn't really worth pushing back on? Or did somebody push it back on where yet to find out? So, I can't get inside his head. I can't get inside his WhatsApp or other WhatsApp in, which I did about an hour ago and he's not responded. So, you know, I will say, again, for the benefit of your listeners, that we don't know what he has to say about this and he's not responded to any of our messages for about five weeks. But no, I don't know if he's broken any rules. I mean, I think I got the clear impression from the cabinet office that they were fully aware of this situation and that he'd in fact asked kind of relevant internal watchdogs for permission to do this. I mean, part of what this scandal so far has exposed is the fact that you are, you know, I think Chris Mason, the BBC's chief political correspondent, made the point that, you know, the problem might not be that anybody broke the rules. It might be the rules themselves because they are so lax. I mean, why don't we, this is the beauty of live streaming. I mean, we can, why don't we just write right now, take a look at what it was that the government said. But I'm pretty sure there was a reference in it into exactly what was known by the cabinet office at the time. And it's all pretty interesting stuff. I mean, I'm just doing that right now. So it says, this is a letter to Eric Pickles, the head of a Cobra. The cabinet office says that Mr. Cruthers took up a role advising the Board of Greens of Capital in September 2015, whilst he was employed as a civil service, a servant. This was agreed via the cabinet office internal conflict of interest policy, which advises on how to address real or perceived conflicts of interest. Mr. Cruthers then left the cabinet office in a civil service at the end of November 2015, and he was already working in an advisory capacity to green cell before he left the civil service with this role captured under the conflict of interest policy. No application was required to be submitted to a Cobra at this time. This is actually a double whammy of a revelation. Number one, he worked for Greensill whilst working for government. But number two, because he told government that he was doing this, he wasn't required to subject himself to the normal Cobra procedures, which by the way, the clues in the name is an advisory board, but at least there's some transparency that comes with it. But because he'd already got his foot in the door during his civil service career, there was no obligation from once he left to resubmit an application to join. So we've only found out about this today. So he would have been the government's head of procurement, well he was the government's head of procurement. Yeah, so that's a hugely powerful role. Presumably he was on extraordinary money, and he's been paid by the taxpayer. Whatever you think about complex of interest, just purely, I mean, if you run a company and you're paying somebody £150,000 a year or whatever he's on, you would want that person to just do that job. You wouldn't want them to have another job simultaneously. I mean, that's remarkable that got signed off. This isn't a junior role we're talking about here. No, I mean, I mean, what can one say? He was in charge of £64 billion of government contracts every year. He set the guard rails of the government's procurement policy. He was in charge of commercial directors in all departments. He was a guy advising on how payment was executed, who we should be prioritising. You know, it was in his gift. He was, yeah, I mean, it's sort of kind of like a millennial thing to do, say he was literally this, but he was literally the head of the Crown Commercial Service. What more can one say whilst working for Greensill Capital? And normally, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong here, Gary, normally the advisory sort of situation is that you don't have a position for two years after leaving the Civil Service. Is that right? I think that's for ministers. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. I might be wrong because I don't know what senior civil servants. I thought sorry. So I thought it was for both Ministers and for senior civil servants. So as you as you understand it, there's no actual sort of. I actually don't know. I just I've always just in my head had the two years thing as being a ministerial obligation. But maybe that's because what civil servants have to do when any office tends to be that's interesting to journalist it well. You might be right. It might be both. I mean, that's just that's just remark that is I mean, in many ways, that's the most remarkable story of all of all of this. Because you know, I think people people have their whatever you call it confirmation bias. People have their thoughts and feelings about politicians and about civil servants, you know, doing various things. But I think somebody having two jobs simultaneously with such a massive conflict of interest is like, I think the brain emojis are good. A good way of talking about Gabriel, you do big investigations at the Sunday Times. How big do you think this is? Do you think you might be talking about this story for the next two, three months? Do you think the government will make it go away with inquiry? We're all kind of beholden to events, dear boy, in the words of Harold Macbillan. And so, you know, I don't really know what could happen. This could be wiped off the news agenda by something much more interesting, like, for instance, the funeral of a nonagenarian royal in six days time. I mean, you know, I'm not sure this could be wiped off the news agenda. But it feels to me like it goes too deep and too wide. One thing I keep saying to people is complex. And, you know, I like basically most journalists are not particularly economically literate. So it does require emphasizing this is not just an SW1 thing. This is already led to criminal investigations in other countries. But moreover, people are actually going to lose their jobs because of it. You know, David Cameron, he wasn't just lobbying for a benevolent fintech company. He was lobbying for a company who, as we now know, was hand in glove with this potentially fraudulent steel tycoon. Like, this whole business empire was based on the collateralization of toxic loans. And it's going to cost a lot of people their livelihoods, or you and me, you and I rather, are going to be paying for it because the government is going to be bailing out the steel industry. Sanjeev Gupta is the third biggest, he's responsible for the third biggest steel manufacturer in the country, employed 5,000 people. You know, when Debonance goes bust, nobody's saying, oh, it can't be allowed to fail. But there is this sense that steel is too big to fail. It's kind of critical to our national infrastructure. It's critical arguably to our political identity. It's important for Boris Johnson because of the red wall. The government is fearful of Sanjeev Gupta phoenixing his business, Liberty Steel, which would involve basically allowing the government to bail it out and then buying it back for nothing. So the government kind of has been pretty reluctant to say that I help out Gupta himself and they're trying to find a fix to prevent him having anything to do with the company in the event that they do provide state support. But our money is on the line and people's jobs are on the line. And so, you know, it's not just, oh, that's pretty crazy that the head of the Crown Commercial Service wore two hats at once, or it's pretty crazy the Cameron, so brazenly lobbied the Chancellor for something. It's like, all of this stuff, let's collateralize all the narratives of this. You know, there's a hell of a lot going on, and it's going to cost a lot of people a lot. Final question. What do you think the sort of political fallout is going to be? I mean, because I hate these takes. So there was John Rental that appeased on the independent, he goes, oh, what does this mean? Politically, will Labour make hair? In a way that, I mean, that's an important question, of course, but it's entirely ancillary to the actual story itself. But do you think there is the impression among some people that this could be a major problem for the Conservatives? Because of course, you know, Labour's big sort of political interventions have been about cronyism. I mean, I think that's quite a weak thing generally, but this is a really outrageous story. You've got some Labour sources, I'm sure, close to leadership. Is there a sense there that there's also the extra sort of political dimensions there that's going to play out between the two parties? I mean, look, yeah, we know it's all through the Labour world. I mean, just to briefly pontificate on the Labour Party, Keir Starmer, for his first year in office, made himself all about efficiency and competence versus Tory inefficiency and incompetence. And in so doing, he made himself a hostage to fortune. He looked pretty clever and pretty cute when he was calling for circuit breakers and saying that the government should do this and the government was not doing this and then eventually had to do this. That was fine until the government stopped looking incompetent. And since then, they've sort of box trotted to a slightly different place, which is, as you say, that big focus on charmocracy and on cronyism, which has bedeviled Tory government's past and present. I mean, it was a big theme of David Cameron's time in office. It was widely regarded, at least like the narrative was that it was really important in the downfall of John Major. So, you know, Sleaze is certainly back on the agenda. And, you know, in terms of how politically important this will be, what will the political fallout be? As you say, you know, it's kind of extraneous to the story, but potentially really significant. And I do get the sense that there has been this drip drip drip of alleged corruption and cronyism stories over the last year. One never knows when like the drip drip drip led leads to the downbursting and there being a kind of a moment in our society where something happens, you know, it was under John Major that because of the cash for questions affair, he got Lord Nolan to draw up the seven principles that are now statutorily embedded in how public life is supposed to operate. And he also was the guy, you know, he also led to the creation of the Committee on Standards in Public Life. And you know, I don't know if this will be something similar. I mean, the government has created an inquiry, which is a hell of a lot more than has been case for stories of this ilk over the last year, say, when it came to Robert Generick and Richard Desmond. So it might be that we're on the brink of a turning point. It might be the government manages to smother this. And, you know, the political contours of it are interesting because you almost feel like the sea is sort of lapping at the shores of the government, but not quite submerging it right now. Because soon as really involved, I mean, he texted Cameron about this stuff. Hancock met Cameron about this stuff. Two other Tory ministers in the form of Jesse Norman and John Glenn were contacted by Cameron. So was Boris Johnson's business advisor. But it's not that clear the government's necessarily done anything obscenely wrong. Like I was outlining to you earlier that the Treasury gave a lot of face time to Greensill, but it did still say no in the end. And so, you know, for that reason, and for the fact that Boris Johnson has so effectively differentiated himself from Cameron, it is not clear how toxic this will be for the Tories in due course. It might end up being more toxic for facing politics, you know, maybe it ends up being like a rerun of the expensive stuff, like I can say. Yeah, that's the thing with these kinds of stories, you know, disillusion is often the primary consequence. Gabriel, it's been fantastic talking to you now. We've been going for about 45 minutes. I learned an immense amount in that conversation. Keep up the great work. Thank you. It's lovely to be able to talk to you very much. Yeah. Well, we'll have you on again soon, I'm sure, especially if there's more developments with this story. Take care. Thanks. See you later. Bye. Um, that was a really amazing conversation. I don't know what others thought about that. I thought it was amazing and it feels like with the Greensill story and it's from the sounds of it, it's something we'll be covering as an organization over the coming weeks and months. The service are on the hook here almost as much as politicians, maybe even more so. Uh, before I go anywhere, you know what to do. This is Downstream on Evara Media. We're going live every Tuesday. We're not live. We're broadcasting every Tuesday. If you've not already hit the like button, it doesn't cost a thing. It doesn't cost a single thing. And once you've done that, please hit the subscribe button. And what are you doing if you haven't done that already? Right? You know, this is, uh, this is 2021. Of course, you subscribe to Evara Media. Finally, if you want to see more content like this, go to Evara Media.com forward slash support, make a one off payment, or a rolling commitment, become a supporter. We encourage one hour's wage work. So if you're on 15 pounds an hour lucky you, we would recommend 15 pounds a month to help us build a new media for a different politics to cover stories like this, but also uncover them ourselves. You know, this is a very rare instance, I think of, you know, the FT and the Sunday Times doing great work, the investigations, the Sunday Times have historically been very good, but there's clearly nowhere near enough of that in our media. And it's something that Evara Media would really like to do. It takes a lot of resources though. So if you want to see that kind of work here at Evara, coming from the left, go to Evara Media.com forward slash support. My name is Aaron Bostani. I'm incredibly well lit today because it's just a bright day all of a sudden. You've been fantastic. Thanks for joining us. Michael Walker is back tomorrow with Tisgy Sar. He'll be with Dahlia. I'll be with Michael on Friday. So I'll see you then. Good night.