Greensill critic Myners discussed taking role at firm, emails show

Lord Paul Myners, the former City minister, in 2019 discussed taking a potentially lucrative job at Greensill Capital, a company he recently compared to a “Ponzi scheme”, according to emails disclosed on Tuesday.

Myners, a City grandee who previously chaired Marks and Spencer, has been a persistent public critic of Greensill, asking difficult questions of the now collapsed financial company.

Greensill is at the centre of an escalating political and business scandal involving lobbying by its former adviser David Cameron, British prime minister from 2010 to 2016, and its links to GFG Alliance, the metals group being probed by the Serious Fraud Office.

Myners appeared to respond in a broadly positive way in July 2019 when he met Lex Greensill, founder of the eponymous company, who invited him to join the board, according to the emails released by the House of Commons Treasury select committee.

The messages show Myners asked about what kind of financial package he might receive.

However, Myners told the Financial Times on Tuesday that he “never once considered taking a role at Greensill Capital”.

The emails began when the peer asked a question in the House of Lords in June 2019, inquiring of the Treasury whether the government would “investigate conflicts of interest in the promotion of trade finance bonds in association with Greensill”.

That led to a July meeting which Myners previously told a Treasury select committee hearing ended with him rejecting the directorship: “I left that meeting . . . travelling down in the lift, thinking to myself, this has many of the elements of a Ponzi scheme,” he told MPs. He also said Cameron should have noticed multiple flaws in the Greensill business model.

However, the emails released on Tuesday give the impression that only two months later Myners was interested in taking a position in the company. On September 19 he wrote: “The information I am seeking is on the role he has in mind for me, time commitment and package.”

In one message, dated October 7, 2019, he praised the Australian financier for securing backing from Japan’s SoftBank: “A powerful endorsement from a global investor of standing,” he wrote. He also described Maurice Thompson, the company’s chair, as “informed, intelligent, engaged and charming”.

But Myners rejected the offer, citing health concerns: “In the circumstances I think I must decline your interesting idea.”

Yet on October 24 Myners was still holding out the possibility that he might “do something together” with Greensill.

However, Myners told the FT on Tuesday that he continued his talks with Greensill for as long as he did because he saw them “as an opportunity to test my reservations about Greensill Capital”. “I tried to use wording which I hoped would give Mr Greensill a reason to continue engaging with me,” he said.

Elsewhere, the exchanges show the extent to which Lex Greensill leaned on Myners to provide a statement suggesting that he was “comfortable” with Greensill Capital. The proposed statement would include the phrase “I heard and saw nothing that would warrant the use of the word fraudulent or anything similar.”

Myners said he could give a limited approval of such a statement given media reports in Europe which had said he had “used the word fraud or implied it”.

But he insisted that any such document could only be shared with investors on a “case-by-case basis” with his approval on each occasion and not released generally to the media.