A secret meeting between finance executives and a senior Tory cabinet minister arranged by Keir Starmer’s top business aide Varun Chandra has prompted the lobbying watchdog to launch an investigation into his former firm, Hakluyt & Company.
A lengthy openDemocracy investigation has uncovered a host of meetings between Chandra and senior figures in the Conservative government. Among these was a roundtable never properly disclosed by the government, which Chandra arranged, involving then Tory cabinet minister Kwasi Kwarteng and ten leading financiers.
Hakluyt is now formally under investigation after openDemocracy shared our findings with the Office for the Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists (ORCL). Hakluyt insisted it has done nothing wrong.
As UK lobbying law only applies when lobbying is carried out on behalf of a client, this meeting with Kwarteng is believed to be the focus of the watchdog’s investigation.