Follow the Money 1 - Green Money
Ed Miliband received £99,000 from the Green Finance Institute. He also appointed Rachel Kyte as UK Special Representative for Climate. Are these things linked?
Yesterday I challenged the Minister for Energy Consumers, Miatta Fahnbulleh, about the appointment of Rachel Kyte as UK Special Representative for Climate.
What had caught my eye was some very large sums of money flowing between different organisations and to the Labour party and Labour politicians.
Rachel Kyte is co-chair of an advisory board of Quadrature Climate Foundation, an organisation funded by a hedge fund, Quadrature, which is based in the Caymans.
Quadrature donated £4 million to the Labour Party. The donation itself has attracted significant controversy.
It is also interesting that the Quadrature donation was made shortly before the election so it only became public after votes were counted….
My question to Fahnbulleh, which the minister entirely failed to answer, was about whether Ed Miliband declared to his department the green money he was receiving, when he sought to appoint Kyte to this Special Representative role.
Let’s go through the money flow
1) Labour takes £4 million from Quadrature:
This donation is set out on the Electoral Commission website and was the biggest single donation of General Election 2024. The timing of the donation raised questions about whether it was deliberately hidden by the Labour Party until after the election.
2) Quadrature funds Quadrature Climate Foundation:
QCF’s website sets out that ‘Quadrature Climate Foundation (QCF) was established in 2019 by the founders of Quadrature Capital’.
QCF is a registered charity.
Two of the four trustees of QCF are Quadrature Capital’s founders.
As the Companies House documents set out, QCF is essentially funded by Quadrature:
3) Quadrature Climate Foundation funds the Green Finance Institute:
The charity QCF has given the Green Finance Institute (GFI) a total of $3,830,267 according to QCF’s website.
4) The Green Finance Institute funds Ed Miliband (and Rachel Reeves):
The Green Finance Institute then funds Ed Miliband and Rachel Reeves to the value of £99,000. See the Parliamentary Register of Interests for the Energy Secretary:
Was the donation declared?
These are large sums of money. There’s nothing wrong with lots of money going into climate policy research. Quadrature should be commended for using some of their profits for charitable ends. And there is no suggestion that anyone other than the ministers has done anything wrong.
My question was about whether Ed Miliband who (along with David Lammy) appointed Rachel Kyte to a prestigious Special Representative role, declared to his departmental Permanent Secretary that he had taken money from an organisation funded by QCF when he asked to appoint their adviser to a Government role.
As I have set out previously, ministers are obliged under the Ministerial Code to take steps scrupulously to avoid even the perception of a Conflict of Interest:
‘Ministers must scrupulously avoid any danger of an actual or perceived conflict of interest between their Ministerial position and their private financial interests’.
If Ed Miliband did not tell Jeremy Pocklington, his Permanent Secretary about the donation he will not have taken steps to avoid the danger of a conflict of interest. It could look like a ‘reward’ for donations made by the organisation which Kyte advises.
The failure of Minister Fahnbulleh to give a simple assurance that everything relating to Kyte’s appointment had been declared properly raised my suspicions that things had not been.
Note - that Kyte’s appointment page on gov.uk makes no reference to her role at Quadrature Climate Foundation (which is ongoing), despite giving a detailed list of her positions and former positions.
After all, we know that Rachel Reeves failed to declare to her Permanent Secretary that she had taken money from Ian Corfield when she sought to appoint him to the Civil Service. [That appointment had to be undone and replaced by a role outside the Civil Service. But we found out this morning that Arden Strategies, run by ex-Labour Minister Jim Murphy, has been arranging meetings with Ian Corfield in the Treasury buildings. Interestingly, HM Treasury declined to comment on the story].
And we don’t know whether the money which Peter Kyle and Nick Thomas-Symonds received was properly declared when they sought to bring people into the Civil Service linked to donations they had received, as I also pointed out yesterday:
The only way to clear all of this up is for ministers to come clean about what has been going on.
And finally
Some eagle-eyed Whitehall watchers spotted that Kyte was wearing an Extinction Rebellion badge in the pictures circulating after her appointment as Special Representative.
That’s the very same Extinction Rebellion which the Prime Minister took aim at today in the pages of The Sun.
This is why the question of whether political donations are buying not just access but policy positions is continuing to be raised.