Why is a Labour government keeping Rishi Sunak’s finances under wraps?

K eir Starmer promised ‘integrity and honesty’. But his government is backing a last-ditch effort to keep us in the dark about Sunak’s investments while he was prime minister.

It seems obvious that we should know if the people running the country will make money out of new government policies. But somehow both Tory and Labour governments disagree. So we’re heading to a tribunal hearing next week, on 4 and 5 December.

Under the current rules, government ministers are allowed to profit from investment portfolios. Many ministers manage them through a third party in a blind trust. This is supposed to make sure ministers can’t see where their money is being invested.

But as our executive director Jo Maugham has said, blind trusts are no defence against conflicts of interest. The only way to make sure ministers and MPs can’t profit from government decisions is to make them sell off their stocks and shares before taking office.

Rishi Sunak had a blind trust while he was prime minister. But we don’t know who was managing it. His blind trust could have been managed by one of his friends or a major Tory donor. So, how can we tell whether Sunak was truly “blind” to where his money was going? Ministers have to declare significant investments in a public register. So all this arrangement did was blind the public to his shareholdings.

Maybe Sunak’s fund was investing in fossil fuels, and reaped the rewards of his ill-fated green policy rollback in September 2023? We just don’t know.

Last year, we asked the Cabinet Office to tell us who was managing Sunak’s blind trust. But the Tory government blocked our freedom of information request, claiming that it wasn’t in the public interest.

We think it is, so we complained to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).  After a long process, the ICO decided that the government should tell them the name of Sunak’s fund manager, so they could weigh up whether it could be released to us and the wider public.

That should have been the end of the matter. But the Cabinet Office has taken it to a tribunal.

We’re all too familiar with the tactics deployed by the Tories to duck transparency – just look at their unlawful PPE VIP lane. But it’s shocking that the new government under Labour has pressed ahead with this hearing.

Labour were elected on a manifesto that said restoring public trust in politics “will require a reset in our public life; a clean-up that ensures the highest standards of integrity and honesty.”

But in stark contrast, the Cabinet Office’s continued refusal to share this information shows an alarming disregard for the principles of honesty and integrity, which Labour was so keen to trumpet.

This is not just about Rishi Sunak. The outcome of next week’s hearing will have much wider implications for what all of us are told about the financial interests of the people running our country – whoever they are.

GOING FURTHER

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Sources:

▪ This piece was first published in Good Law Project and re-published in PUBLIC SQUARE UK on 2 December 2024 under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. | The authors write in a personal capacity.

▪ Cover: Flickr/Number 10. (Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.)