Ministers advised to use 'blind trusts' to hide potentially conflicting shares
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Version 0 of 1. Ministers with financial shareholdings that may cause a conflict with their jobs have been advised to use special “blind trusts” which allow their corporate interests to remain secret from the public. The new list of ministerial interests shows 13 government ministers have blind trusts or similar financial management arrangements. These include the culture secretary, John Whittingdale, the Northern Ireland secretary, Theresa Villiers, the defence minister, Philip Dunne, the commercial secretary to the Treasury, Lord O’Neill and Robert Buckland, the solicitor general. The trusts mean temporarily handing over day-to-day management of their shares to a third party, which is supposed to ensure they avoid any conflict of interest. However, ministers will still know which shareholdings were put into the blind trust in the first place. The Cabinet Office will not reveal which of the ministers created blind trusts in order to get around the problem of potential conflicts of interest. But Sir Alex Allan, the independent adviser on ministers’ interests and a former chairman of the joint intelligence committee, has revealed that there are several cases in which he accepted the creation of the trusts to allow ministers to keep hold of their corporate shareholdings. In his annual report of his activities (pdf), Allan said he believed that all issues concerning ministerial interests had been satisfied, but there were some cases in which he had to consider “whether it was appropriate for ministers to hold shares in particular companies where there might be thought to be a connection to their portfolio”. “In some cases, this has been resolved by ministers placing their holdings under a blind management arrangement, in others by disposing of their shareholding, or by rearranging ministerial portfolios,” he said. The list of ministerial interests reveals that some ministers have been allowed to keep shareholdings outside of blind trusts, including the business minister Lucy Neville-Rolfe, who has share options in Tesco; Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, who has an interest in Eurotunnel; the communities minister Mark Francois, who has shares in Lloyds Banking Group, and Patrick McLoughlin, the transport secretary, who has a shareholding in the insurer Aviva. A range of documents relating to ministerial hospitality, meetings, gifts and travel were also published as part of a deluge of information on the last day of parliament before Christmas. They showed that almost £15,000 was spent on RAF flights for the prime minister’s trips abroad and £11,000 on those made by the chancellor. David Cameron promised to run the most transparent government ever when the Liberal Democrat-Conservative coalition came to power, by publishing a list of ministerial interests every six months. However, the list was only rarely updated under the coalition, meaning many ministers came and went from the government without their relevant financial interests being made public. |