Grant Shapps admits he had second job as 'millionaire web marketer' while MP
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Version 0 of 1. Grant Shapps, the Tory party chairman, had a second job as a “multimillion-dollar web marketer” under the pseudonym Michael Green for at least year after he first became an MP. It is a suggestion that Shapps has repeatedly denied for three years, but the Guardian has discovered a recording from the summer of 2006 in which the Conservative MP for Welwyn Hatfield boasts his products could make listeners a “ton of cash by Christmas”. Rather than running down his operations it appears that in 2006 Shapps was expanding the company. On a recording made in the summer of that year, the Tory MP says over the next few months he will be running his “mentoring programme” to hire 10 staff, produce software to create websites that “Google prefers” and start selling “Stinking Rich 3” the latest tome in a range of self-help guides that claimed to make customers wealthy and which “sell fantastically well”. Posing as Green, Shapps tells fellow web entrepreneur Peter Twist that “[Stinking Rich] is not a cheap product, but it’s a great internet marketing product”. At no point in the 40-minute sales pitch does Shapps reveal his true identity. His entry in the parliamentary register of members’ interest for 2005 and 2006 lists his directorships and shareholdings in a printing firm and How To Corp, the “marketing” company then fronted by Michael Green. But since 2012 when pictures emerged of Shapps in 2004 at a $3,000-a-head US internet conference where he was photographed wearing a badge describing himself as “Michael Green” the MP consistently defended himself saying he had stopped being Green after he took his seat in the Commons. When confronted with the audio, which shows he was still operating as Green over a year after the 2005 general election, a Tory party spokesman said that Shapps now conceded “his writing career [as Green]... ended shortly after [becoming an MP].” Prior to this concession Shapps had gone to extraordinary lengths to insist he had never been Michael Green after being elected in May 2005. Last November the Tory party chairman used legal threats to force a local constituent and ex-Labour councillor to delete an allegedly libellous post on a Facebook group about his use of the pseudonym and replace it with an apology that explicitly states that he was not using the Michael Green pseudonym when he was an MP. In papers seen by the Guardian, Shapp’s lawyers wrote to the constituent noting “your agreement to post an apology requires you (to) make a ‘new’ post (ie a post on the ‘homepage’ of the group, and not a comment on another post)”. The lawyers state that the Tory chairman requires the apology to read: “Mr Shapps MP has at no time misled over the use of a pen name. Indeed, I now understand that he openly published his full name alongside business publications making it clear that he used a pen name merely to separate business and politics, prior to entering parliament.” Although How To Corp was registered to an office in Pinner, north-west London, its products and services were priced in US dollars, and in its product materials How To Corp said it had an office the United States and listed US phone and fax numbers. There was no record of the company when the Guardian checked with the US state authorities. None of the webpages, ebooks, newsletters or audio recordings collected by the Guardian state that Shapps is Michael Green. He is not mentioned in How To Write a Newsletter, where in 2003 Green’s company says it was about to float on the stock exchange with a valuation of $28m (£19m). In fact the company had been started by Shapps in 2000 and it was only registered at Companies House in 2005. The Tory MP transferred his share in the firm to his wife in 2008. How To Corp was dissolved last year after it marketed “scraping” software TrafficPaymaster – the sale of which, the police said, may have been an “offence of fraud”. How to Corp’s websites have now disappeared from the internet and TrafficPaymaster, which claimed to produce web pages by “spinning and scraping” content and sought to attract advertising in contravention of Google’s code of conduct, is no longer on sale. While traces of How to Corp were vanishing, Shapps continued insisting he did not use the name Michael Green while an MP. In September 2012 he told Sky’s Dermot Murnaghan that “before I went in to parliament I used to write business publications and, like many authors, write under a business name”. As the issue of second jobs has risen up the political agenda, the Conservative party chairman has been taken to task over his controversial past – most recently by LBC’s Shelagh Fogarty who extracted three denials from Shapps that he had worked as Michael Green after 2005. A visibly annoyed Conservative party chairman – the radio programme is streamed on YouTube – brings the matter to an end by saying: “I thought the discussion here was second jobs whilst people are MPs. To be absolutely clear. I don’t have a second job. And I have never had a second job whilst I being an MP. End of story.” However on Sunday Shapps conceded that this was not correct. In a statement a spokesman for the Conservative party said: “Like many authors and journalists, Grant wrote with a pen name. This was completely transparent: his full name and biographical details were permanently published on the company’s main website. Given that this was a decade ago, and was mentioned during the cut and thrust of an interview, he referenced that his writing career had ended when he became an MP: in fact it ended shortly afterwards.” Karl Turner, Labour’s shadow solicitor general, said: “It beggars belief that the chairman of the Conservative party went on live radio just three weeks ago and stated three times that he was not doing business as Michael Green while he was an MP, when new reports and audio tonight show quite clearly that he did. “It seems that Mr Shapps’ repeated denials, which were not in the heat of the moment but also included a calculated decision to instruct solicitors, were contrary to the facts. He also appears to have threatened legal action on the basis of this. “David Cameron must now order an immediate inquiry into Mr Shapps’ conduct and establish all the facts in the interest of the public.” |