The Labour Party has called for Prime Minister Boris Johnson to launch an investigation into potential misconduct by Chancellor of the Exchequer Sajid Javid during his pre-politics career in finance.
Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell said he had written to Johnson to reconsider Javid’s fitness for the post, asking him to probe three primary areas of concern relating to the minister’s 18-year-career in financial services, during which time he worked for Deutsche Bank. While there, he was involved in the sale of collateralised debt obligations (CDOs), a complex financial product which played a pivotal role in the 2008 financial crash.
In a letter to the Prime Minister seen by The Guardian, McDonnell said it would “not be lost on those who’ve suffered the consequences of the last nine years of austerity” that the recently-appointed Chancellor “profited from the greed that contributed to it”.
He went on to note Javid, who rose to the board of Deutsche Bank during his time in the City, had been a senior office holder at the German financial giant when a US Senate committee found it’d caused "material damage to ordinary people and the wider global economy", and his opposite number was therefore implicated in "some of the worst excesses of the casino economy".
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McDonnell also demanded Javid publish his tax returns, pointing to a 2014 Mail on Sunday article which said the then-Culture Secretary had been among several senior Deutsche Bank staff paid bonuses through shares in a Cayman Islands company in a bid to reduce the company's tax bill.
However, a Conservative party spokesperson said Labour "might want to use the time better thinking about their own credentials for governing", as the party’s “reckless plans” would see the UK’s national debt “soaring as they spend one thousand billion pounds” and “tax raid on hard-working families”.
"Not content with anti-Semitism rife in their party and their totally incoherent Brexit policy, the only threat to the UK economy is them. Utter disaster. If any party knows about failure and bogus investigations, it’s them,” they said.
