Aaron Chown/PA
Rishi Sunak has been thrust into the spotlight as he faces accusations that he profited handsomely from the financial crash.
Labour stepped up its campaigning this week as the prime minister’s past life as a partner at hedge fund TCI became the focus of its first major attack on the man Sir Keir Starmer hopes to replace.
As the two leaders prepare for the first TV debate on ITV, Starmer hopes to force an interrogation of Sunak on his past at TCI after their involvement in the deal that saw a bank riddled with sub-prime mortgages sold to RBS, which had to be taken over by the government after it collapsed.
Sunak’s boss at the multi-billion fund, Chris Hohn, admitted to a select committee in January 2009 that the fund had bet against British banks during the crash.
Darren Jones, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, told the Guardian he believed Sunak had “bet against Britain” during his time before politics.
“If I was still a member of the liaison committee, I would definitely have been asking questions about his past behaviour, because I think it’s in the public interest that voters know that he essentially bet against Britain and may have profited off the back of it,” he said.
“This is exactly the type of past behaviour where if you become a public official or you come into public office, you need to be accountable and transparent about that.”
Sunak is believed to have been one of 19 TCI partners who shared more than £93 million of the profit in 2008, meaning he was likely to have walked away with £5 million as the taxpayer bailed out RBS.
Jones said that Sunak would have been aware of the deal. “This was the biggest banking deal at the time.”
The Treasury has previously said Sunak did not have a direct role in the deal.
A Conservative spokesperson said in response to the attack: “This is not correct. The Labour party created the banking crisis which caused Labour’s great recession. In 2008, while Starmer chose to be in a foreign court defending terrorists, Rachel Reeves was part of the mortgage team at HBOS that had to be bailed out by the taxpayer at a cost of tens of billions and turfed thousands of families from their homes.”
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