Right so whilst Rishi Sunak has presided over the country for 100 days today, not to mention enough sleaze to fill a bathtub, he himself might not be so innocent and maybe that’s why he’s so weak to act against others. How much dirt do they have on him perhaps?
Well one issue has gained a lot of prominence and it’s not thanks to any of our media who are running scared of commenting on it, but somebody running with it and that person is Carol Vorderman.
It should be pointed out though, that many of these questions have been asked in the media before now and just didn’t gain much traction.
Sunak’s got some questions to answer relating to his involvement with Moderna, the COVID vaccine pharmaceutical company and whether he profited from purchasing their vaccines for use in the UK upon news of their successful trials breaking. All of our recent booster shots that we’ve had have tended to be either Pfizer of Moderna of course, the AstraZeneca one many of us initially had slowly being replaced by Moderna as the pandemic progressed.
Moderna itself is a US biotech pharmaceutical company. For years it’s done research into new medicines, new vaccines using RNA and mRNA technology, a brand new style of vaccine completely using molecules to trigger immune responses at a genetic level instead of the old style traditional vaccine of injecting an inert sample of a disease to do the same thing.
Right, let’s look at where Rishi Sunak comes into this picture. Sunak as we know was a Green Card holder in the US until rather recently, as in was Chancellor of the Exchequer recently, and had lived and studied in the US for some time, he went to Stanford University, it’s where he met his wife, but he also helped set up a Hedge Fund called Theleme Partners with a Frenchman called Patrick Degorce in 2009, which has it’s offices here in the UK, but is registered in the Cayman Islands of course because tax is for the little guys right Rishi?
Fast forward to 2013 and Moderna were looking to commercialise their mRNA vaccine technology, but had by this time already secured some early investment and one of the early investors from the year before, 2012, was Theleme. So Theleme had invested in Moderna in 2012, held shares in Moderna, from 2012 and these were valued in 2020 at being worth some $500m, some 20% of Theleme’s business interests. The pandemic meant Moderna’s stock certainly rose to estimates of investment of double that since.
Now Rishi Sunak left the US in 2013, the following year that Theleme invested in Moderna in order to pursue a political career back here in the UK. The same year his Theleme business partner Degorce got done by HMRC to the tune of £8m of unpaid tax as part of his UK hedge fund business dealings, he tried one of those celebrity film company tax avoidance type schemes and it didn’t work out for him despite fighting it and was ordered to cough up back in 2017.
Anyway, Sunak might have left Theleme in 2013, but did he still retain any financial interests there? With hedge funds, particularly with partners as Sunak was, your own money tends to be tied up in these things too, you have investment of your own in the management company, the hedge fund itself, but did Sunak ever extract himself from Theleme completely?
Unfortunately, being registered in the Cayman Islands means financial records do not need to be made public, hence the big hoo hah when a load of them got leaked as the Paradise Papers a few years back, but there is one indication that he might not have done and that he still has financial ties to Theleme and therefore to Moderna as well. In a 2019 entry of the ministers register of financial interests, which do have to be made public here, Sunak revealed he was the beneficiary of a blind trust. These are difficult financial structures to set up, they aren’t done on a whim and are inherently shady because the beneficiary can claim to have no knowledge whatsoever as to what exactly they are benefitting from. Functionally it means that Sunak can claim there is no conflict of interest because he has no knowledge of the specific assets maintained in the trust and has no control over them.
Now of course if this trust does relate to any financial connection to Theleme and therefore Moderna, he’s probably got a legal scapegoat even though it’d go down like cold sick with the public. It’d still be damaging. If it is related to Theleme, when 80% of their asset management has nothing to do with Moderna, Sunak could argue he cannot knowingly be benefitting from Moderna’s success in this way and this is of course important because Moderna have won government contracts here to supply COVID vaccines.
Now all we know for sure is that Sunak was a beneficiary of a blind trust. We don’t know if it actually has anything to do with Theleme or Moderna at all. When questioned about this though, Sunak has always refused to answer. Now he ought to know if he has shares in Theleme still, even if the blind trust, if relevant, hides him from any knowledge of benefitting from Moderna’s success through that and the business it has done with the UK government.
As dodgy as this blind trust excuse might be, it would protect Sunak from having done anything illegal, such as the insider trading he’s been accused of potentially being guilty of by Carol Vorderman, but as much as he’d have the law onside, he wouldn’t have public opinion, but his refusal to directly answer these questions means they aren’t going away either and given all the sleaze he’s presided over, his weakness to act on others over their conduct, their tax affairs, means people are going to assume the worst of him regardless and with Moderna set to pull that big pharma stunt of hiking its prices to disgusting levels, having made profits of some £12bn in 2021, it’s going to become increasingly immoral for him to not come clean. This is especially important with newscirculating that Moderna may have even more involvement with our health service going forwards, for example a new £1bn vaccine centre.
There might be one more twist to the tale though courtesy of Carol Vorderman who has stated that Sunak brought in a Theleme partner called John Sheridan as a pandemic advisor to the government. Sheridan’s role according to the only source I’ve been able to lay my hands on over this, which alas is the Murdoch Times was as an advisor on the coronavirus loans scheme, Sheridan being a financial analyst, but this is a verifiable connection between Sunak and Theleme at a point after Sunak left the hedge fund and entered government and knowing Theleme’s connection to Moderna, the money it was making from Moderna’s success, that this is to my mind an extremely difficult story for Sunak to explain away, he clearly still has connections of some sort to Theleme and the longer he stays silent, the more damage it’s going to keep doing to him.