Exercise due diligence in selecting investments and the people with whom you invest—in other words, do your homework. To its founder, Greensill Capital is more than a business: his whole new identity depends upon it. As the story unfolds, we see his drive and determination evolve fatally into messianic ambition and a blinkered disregard for differing views. I mean in the end, I think you made several million pounds. It's unclear exactly how much Cameron was paid, but certainly a substantial amount of money. I think there was also, for Cameron may be, an appeal that this was a fast-growing fintech in theory. And so that's a bit more exciting than going to work on the Board of an established company. A bit cooler, a bit more kind of future of Britain. And so I think there's an appeal. What's interesting to me is that the red flags around Greensill were pretty easy to spot by then. In the centuries since, factoring became part of the supply chains that grew around the world, oiled by liquidity. As these operations became faster and more complex they needed not just factoring but reverse factoring, in which people sell their debt, rather than their credit, and each agent in the chain is paid straight away. The process became computerised, and modern global trade now runs on a silent river of digitised debt. NATHAN HUNT: I have to wonder what on earth was the former Prime Minister of the U.K. David Cameron doing wrapped up in Greensill Capital. Why was he involved in this?

And so that's part of what he's doing. The other piece of it is to say, hey, I've got this super duper new technology, which will make this thing run a lot more smoothly. The reality actually was slightly different. The technology mostly wasn't Greensill Capital, there was very little technology at Greensill at all. And he was relying largely on third-party technology platforms. And the other reality that was different was that much of Greensill's business was not supply chain finance at all. It was just lending, unsecured lending usually to risky companies. NATHAN HUNT: One of the things that Greensill focused on, very early on in his career was the idea of supply chain finance, the possibilities of supply chain finance. Certainly, Greensill didn't invent this. It's been around for a long time. I'm wondering if you can tell me a bit about what is supply chain finance? And it's a question I took to Credit Suisse, and I took to SoftBank as a journalist many times. It was so startlingly problematic. In the end, The Bond & Credit Co. was taken over by a company -- Japanese insurer, Tokio Marine. And when Tokio Marine got involved, they looked at The Bond & Credit Co's exposure to Greensill and the Green -- the funds that were investing in Greensill assets. And they said, hey, this is too much. We don't want to do this anymore. And that really spelled the end, right, because without that insurance, the funds that have invested in Greensill's assets, they're no longer able to go out to the same pool of investors. It was not just the Cameron government. Credit Suisse and SoftBank fell for the patter and piled in billions. He gets business cards with Downing Street that [indiscernible] (00:09:13) and that kind of thing. He holds meetings in Downing Street, really kind of pushes it beyond -- his role beyond what it really ought to have been. But it seems to work for him. And certainly, when Cameron leaves office, he leaves having left Lex with a much higher profile than he had previously.In March 2021, an obscure financial technology company called Greensill Capital collapsed, going into administration. As it unravelled, a multibillion-dollar scandal emerged that would shake the very foundations of the British political system, drawing in swiss bankers, global CEOs, and world leaders, including former British Prime Minister, David Cameron. At the centre was an Australian financier named Lex Greensill. And in that case, there's a few million dollars of maybe somebody who has got a little bit more than that has been poured into these funds, which have been sold as ultrasafe, but in fact, they aren't really. They're full of risky loans. And so Credit Suisse played a really important role in fueling Greensill Capital growth, but also spreading the risk to people who didn't understand what they were getting into.

It's OK as far as it goes but the author doesn't come across anywhere near the skill of for example, Ian Fraser in his book Shredded which is about RBS. I can't think why there wasn't more in here about Gupta and why Greensill was so chained to what was going on with that company. In the end it was obvious why but nowhere near enough work done to explain that. NATHAN HUNT: In the end, it was actually a small insurance company that collapsed the house of cards that was Greensill Capital. How did that come about?DUNCAN MAVIN: Yes, I think that's right. I think this is -- it's tempting sometimes to see these big kind of corporate scandals in terms of big systems and institutions. But at the heart of this one, is the guy Lex Greensill. And he's fascinating, a really divisive character. Some people I talked to said Lex is really charismatic and a genius. And other people I talked to said, stay away from Lex, things are going to go wrong. DUNCAN MAVIN: Yes. They were a very difficult group of people to deal with because Lex had this tendency to say things that weren't true. It's unusual in my experience that people will outright lie to your face as a journalist. In this case, there were people around Greensill who were doing that regularly. And not just Lex Greensill, not just his PR person, his spokesperson, but also lawyers who were acting for Greensill Capital and so on, would tell me things that later turned out to not be true or deny things that I took to them and tell me that I was wrong, only for it later to become apparent that I wasn't wrong. It just became too big. And such a major part of Greensill's business was heavily reliant on what Sanjeev Gupta was up to. And that business now is under investigation by the SFO in the U.K. And so clearly, there was a problem there. As the Conservative Party self-immolates in the wake of the public’s final loss of patience with the Prime Minister, Duncan Mavin’s new book, The Pyramid of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Billion-Dollar Scandal, is a useful reminder that the creeping (now overwhelming) impression of tawdriness in public life did not begin with Boris.

When I started to look into it based on this documentation I received, I realized Greensill was the story. And it didn't really take an awful lot of digging to figure that out. NATHAN HUNT: A final question, Duncan. You also became a character in the Greensill story, an unwilling character, but a character. As you were investigating Greensill for Dow Jones and for your book, what was your experience with them? See also: Inside Jason Miller’s plan to turn the Big Lie into a big business – and a second term for Trump] When the company finally collapsed it exposed the revolving door between Westminster and big business and how David Cameron was allowed to lobby ministers for cash that would save Greensill’s doomed business. Instead, Credit Suisse and Japan’s SoftBank are nursing billions of dollars in losses, a German bank is under criminal investigation, and thousands of jobs are at risk.An epic true story of ambition, greed and hubris – the collapse of Greensill Capital is a billion pound scandal that shredded the reputation of a British Prime Minister. And Sanjeev's looking for somebody who lend them some money and the 2, they have this kind of symbiotic relationship. So much so that at one point, Sanjeev Gupta is a major shareholder in Greensill Capital. So the 2 become really kind of intertwined and they start to really lean on each other, right? Like Greensill can't really grow without the revenue it gets from Sanjeev Gupta's businesses. And Sanjeev Gupta's businesses known as the GFG Alliance, they can't really grow without the money that Greensill is providing to it. When the company finally collapsed it exposed the revolving door between Westminster and big business and how David Cameron was allowed to lobby ministers for cash that would save Greensill's doomed business. Instead, Credit Suisse and Japan's SoftBank are nursing billions of dollars in losses, a German bank is under criminal investigation, and thousands of jobs are at risk.

PDF / EPUB File Name: The_Pyramid_of_Lies_-_Duncan_Mavin.pdf, The_Pyramid_of_Lies_-_Duncan_Mavin.epub So he grew up in a fairly remote part of Australia, a place called Bundaberg, which is a farming community. His grandfather had started a farm there in the 1940s. And Lex was kind of second, third generation, who was running this farm, mostly farming, sweet potatoes and water melons and things like that. He was clearly kind of a bright guy, a little bit nerdy possibly at school and a sort of fairly rough macho environment that meant he stood out a little bit. DUNCAN MAVIN: That's a great question. So I -- yes, you're right, I've been following this for probably about 4 years now, maybe a little longer than that. And at the time -- I've been a financial journalist for a long time. I was a chartered accountant before that. So just so you know where I'm coming from. But at the time, I wasn't writing an awful lot. I was doing a bit more editing and managing people. And a source -- a longtime source of mine came to me and said, hey, are you paying attention to this company called Greensill Capital? And I said, no, never heard of them. When the victims started comparing notes, they realized the basis of this scam was implausible,” said Lovell, referring to the sheer volume of tractors Gentry would have needed to sell to justify what he promised investors. “The victims can see in hindsight how ludicrous it was to believe that this scheme was true.”DUNCAN MAVIN: That is also a very, very good question. So Lex comes across the government. He makes his government connections from around about 2011. He had met a very senior former Civil Servant named Jeremy Heywood, when he was at Morgan Stanley. They both worked together there. At that point, Lex was a pretty junior guy and Jeremy Heywood was a very senior guy, very high-level Civil Servant who'd moved into the bank temporarily. The Essential Podcast from S&P Global is dedicated to sharing essential intelligence with those working in and affected by financial markets. Host Nathan Hunt focuses on those issues of immediate importance to global financial markets—macroeconomic trends, the credit cycle, climate risk, ESG, global trade, and more—in interviews with subject matter experts from around the world. NATHAN HUNT: Sadly, the losers from Greensill's collapse extend beyond just a few venture capitalists and private equity investors. What was Credit Suisse's role in spreading the exposure to Greensill? Greensill found it difficult to make any money doing it, and so started to finance riskier borrowers, taking out credit insurance to obviate the higher risk of default. The insurance allowed the loans to be marketed, misleadingly, as low-risk to investors. A few years ago, I made it into an intimate meeting at the "top table". Just me and the top brass. I had prepared copious notes to discuss the large deal that was imminent. But I hadn't prepared to discuss horse racing, the ownership of horses, or the best dogs to keep at stables.