LABOUR called for an investigation into David Cameron today following reports he met Treasury officials to lobby for Greensill Capital to access coronavirus business loans. 

The former Tory PM had tried to increase the specialist bank’s access to government-backed Covid-19 emergency loan schemes, according to the Financial Times.

Greensill Capital, a key backer of Liberty Steel, which employs 5,000 people in 12 plants across Britain, went into administration last week. 

Greensill’s lawyers have warned that its collapse could trigger a wave of defaults among its clients and 50,000 job losses.

While Mr Cameron was campaigning to become PM in 2010, he had said that “secret corporate lobbying” was undermining public confidence in the political system. 

Greensill Capital chief executive Lex Greensill was an adviser to Mr Cameron when the latter became PM.

Mr Cameron then became an adviser to Greensill Capital in 2018.

Carillion, an outsourcing group that collapsed in 2018, benefited from the government-endorsed supply chain finance scheme that Mr Greensill helped to establish as an adviser.

MPs have said that the scheme allowed Carillion to “prop up its failing business model.”

Shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds said that Chancellor Rishi Sunak ought to “urgently set the record straight” as to why Greensill Capital was given access to the Treasury during the pandemic, while he was “refusing to engage with groups representing the millions of people he excluded from wage support.”

Labour MP Jon Trickett told the Morning Star that Mr Cameron’s lobbying was “yet another classic example of Tory cronyism on behalf of the bank that employs him.”

Referring to the thousands of steelworkers at risk of losing their jobs, he asked: “Who will speak for them?”

The Treasury said that it had a meeting regarding Greensill Capital but that it decided not to take things further.