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Why exposing MPs’ financial secrets could land you in prison [1]
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Date: 2023-07
Strict rules are the solution to political corruption. But sometimes, they can also be the problem. Powerful elites have a habit of exploiting legal loopholes to hide dark money.
This was something I learnt the hard way in 2015, when I travelled to the seaside town of Lancing to try to dig up the financial secrets of British politicians.
It turns out that Lancing is home to a remarkable database that only a small handful of people have seen. It contains the names of every individual who holds shares in Britain’s biggest companies, showing exactly how much money they have invested in the likes of Tesco, Rolls-Royce and BAE Systems.
For most companies, this information is submitted to Companies House and published online, where it is freely available for anyone to see. But when a business is listed on the stock exchange, a different set of rules kick in – instead of publishing online, the list is recorded in a secretive database.
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The only way of viewing it is to make a formal written request under the Companies Act 2006. If your request is accepted, you can either pay £95 for a copy to be emailed to you, or you can visit a small office in this West Sussex town, where the database is pre-loaded on an ancient desktop computer.
I didn’t just want to look at one company’s list of shareholders: I wanted to look at every FTSE 100 company. That would have meant a bill of £9,500. And so I got on the train to Lancing.
There is a clear public interest in exposing the secret shareholdings held by MPs. When politicians vote against windfall taxes for BP, we should know if they have a financial stake in the company. If a minister brokers an arms deal with Saudi Arabia, we should know if they stand to make money from it.
And even if these conflicts of interests continue, transparency is the minimum requirement.
Yesterday, the Guardian published a series of investigations that did just that, and – for the first time – the undisclosed shareholdings of MPs were made public. They included investments held by the attorney general Victoria Prentis, former prime minister Theresa May, and a host of other senior politicians.
Yet none of these politicians has acted unlawfully. Instead, their shareholdings have been hidden by a series of outdated laws and rules that make this kind of accountability almost impossible.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/parliament-mp-shareholdings-in-publicly-listed-firms-kept-secret-by-companies-act/
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