Pyramid of Lies: The Prime Minister, the Banker and the Billion Pound Scandal

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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. And interestingly, as soon as he gets a role at Greensill Capital, which lends a lot of credibility to the firm to have a former Prime Minister working for you is really a stamp of approval. Why David even did it is really interesting, right? So I think what's the upside for him of his relationship with Greensill Capital: one, is potentially a huge payout. So he gets paid a decent salary, and he gets paid a good bonus, but he also gets options, which had they paid off, he would have got tens of millions of pounds. Lex Greensill had a simple, billion-dollar idea – democratising supply chain finance. Suppliers want to get their invoices paid as soon as possible. Companies want to hold off as long as they can. Greensill bridged the two, it’s mundane, boring even, but he saw an opportunity to profit. However, margins are thin and Lex, ever the risk taker, made lucrative loans with other people’s money: to a Russian cargo plane linked to Vladmir Putin, to former Special Forces who ran a private army, and crucially to companies that were fraudulent or had no revenue. 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. And as you say, in one form or another, it's been around for a long time. In the last I guess, now 25 years or so, there have been various forms of this that have developed that fund it in different ways. In particular Lex's particular slant on this was that he would fund it through selling these loans essentially to investors. So unlike a bank, which is funding this from its own balance sheet, Lex doesn't have a balance sheet. So he goes out to investment funds and says, look, I can provide you with some kind of yield by funding these transactions.

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. The Pyramid of Lies is not elegantly written. The breathless tone of some descriptions verges on comical: the Savoy, where Greensill holds a breakfast meeting, is “a 130-year-old art deco masterpiece, dubbed London’s 'most famous hotel’ and renowned as a favoured haunt of kings and presidents, Hollywood stars and fashionistas”. It is nonetheless worth reading as a meticulously researched and enjoyably lively account of this major financial scandal.

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. Cameron was an authentic member of the upper class who might polish him up. After he destroyed his career and the country’s prospects by taking the UK out of the EU by mistake, Cameron yearned for a comfort Lex Greensill could offer him: obscene amounts of money. 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.

DUNCAN MAVIN: This is also kind of really key to Lex Greensill, right? So you and I might call out a lie. He might say, well, look, I was in the White House, and I gave some advice. So is it really a lie? I think this is also -- you're getting to the heart of one of the real problems with exactly this sort of business. And by this sort of business, I mean, fast-growing tech businesses with kind of visionary founders where there is a reward for them to saying -- making outlandish claims, pushing their reputation and their ambitions as far as it will possibly.Pyramid of Liescharts the meteoric rise and spectacular downfall of Lex Greensill and his company. He had a simple idea that disrupted a trillion dollar industry and drew in Swiss bankers, global CEOs, and world leaders, including former British Prime Minister, David Cameron. But a staid business model concealed dubious practices, as Greensill made increasingly risky loans to fraudulent companies using other people’s money.

And he was clearly really, really ambitious. In his retelling later, and he told this story many, many times, what motivated him to get into supply chain finance. This is his version of events, was watching his parents struggle to get paid on time. So producing their agricultural produce and selling it to supermarkets who then failed to pay until 3 months later or 9 months later or [ over ] a long end. And that sort of left his parents short for a while. And so that in his retelling was that motivated him to say, I'm going to do this in a little guy. I'm going to sort this problem out. And this source said to me, well, you really should and sort of provided me with a little bit of documentation, and I started to look into them they were connected to a scandal that was kind of emerging at a company called GAM, a Swiss asset manager, somebody called a hedge fund. And Greensill was sort of part of that story, but a very minor part of it, at least that's how it was portrayed in most reporting on it. NATHAN HUNT: There is no Greensill Capital without Lex Greensill. So who is this guy? Where did he come from? And what motivated him to get as far as he did? Many of them, they are never going to see the amount that they had put into it,” Guth said. “But they will be able to benefit from some of it. And some of it may be better than nothing at all.” See also: Inside Jason Miller’s plan to turn the Big Lie into a big business – and a second term for Trump]

Pyramid of Lies: The Prime Minister, the Banker and the Billion Pound Scandal

And so suddenly, you see sort of vast amounts of assets pouring into these Credit Suisse funds. In truth, just to echo what I said a little bit earlier, in truth, it wasn't just supply chain finance assets. It was, in fact, kind of loans to risky businesses, some of them complex steel businesses run by Sanjeev Gupta. And so this is Credit Suisse's clients' money. Some of it's pension fund money, some of it's big sovereign wealth fund money. Some of it's money from individual private clients. Pyramid of Lies charts the meteoric rise and spectacular downfall of Greensill and his company. He had a simple idea - democratising supply chain finance - and disrupted a trillion dollar industry in the process. But a staid business model concealed dubious practices as Greensill made increasingly risky loans to fraudulent companies using other people's money. 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. 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. The wood-panelled, chandeliered dining rooms of the Savoy hotel across the road became the office canteen

DUNCAN MAVIN: Yes, that's right. So many of these supply chain finance assets, the biggest insurers in particular, the pension funds and so on, they can't invest in them because they're not investment grade. And so the way you make the investment grade is you take out trade credit insurance, and that makes them investable for a much broader group of investors. The trouble for Lex was a lot of the big trade credit insurers wouldn't work with him. They met him over the years, and they dealt with them over the years and found they didn't like the way we did business. 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. Lex Greensill had a simple, billion-dollar idea - democratising supply chain finance. Suppliers want to get their invoices paid as soon as possible. Companies want to hold off as long as they can. Greensill bridged the two, it's mundane, boring even, but he saw an opportunity to profit. However, margins are thin and Lex, ever the risk taker, made lucrative loans with other people's money: to a Russian cargo plane linked to Vladmir Putin, to former Special Forces who ran a private army, and crucially to companies that were fraudulent or had no revenue. Exercise due diligence in selecting investments and the people with whom you invest—in other words, do your homework.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. 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? NATHAN HUNT: One of the strangest parts of the book for me was the -- and it's a minor point, but it was the fact that when Lex Greensill had attained his position in Downing Street, he nonetheless, also chose to misrepresent his relationship with the Obama administration in the United States. He apparently had been in a meeting in the White House on an occasion, but he turned that into sort of a formal advisory relationship. Why on earth would he lie about something that doesn't give him any additional benefit beyond the Downing Street relationship he already has? And for a form of Prime Minister who really only has his reputation to sell his credibility and his reputation to have put it all on this company, which was already showing some serious red flags, that was a really strange move.