Court rules against government attempt to block release of Sunak’s financial disclosures

We’ve spent well over a year trying to get some basic information from the Cabinet Office. Who managed Sunak’s investments when he was prime minister?

Under both a Conservative and now a Labour government, the Cabinet Office has tried to avoid disclosing this information at every turn. It’s been an arduous process, starting from a simple freedom of information request dispute, leading to the regulator intervening and finally ending up at a two-day First-tier Tribunal hearing.

And now, because of the judgment from that hearing, we’re within touching distance of getting the answers we’ve been looking for.

As prime minister, Rishi Sunak put his investments in a ‘blind trust’. This meant his financial dealings were managed by a third party. Theoretically, being removed from and ‘blind to’ decisions over his own investments meant that he had a buffer from conflicts of interest when policymaking.

But, as we discussed here, there’s a whole series of problems with blind trusts. What if Sunak’s investment fund was managed by a friend, an ex-colleague or even a Tory donor?

So all we’ve wanted to do is get disclosure of the name of the company that managed his investments while he was in government and the name of the fund. That’s it.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) told the Cabinet Office that it had to share these details with them, so it could weigh up whether they could be released to us and the wider public. But the Cabinet Office appealed against this order, a move which the regulator’s lawyer told a tribunal hearing was “highly unusual”.

In a significant judgment, a Tribunal has now dismissed the Cabinet Office’s appeal. This isn’t just about Sunak. We wrote here about why it is so important that there should be transparency about Ministers’ financial interests. And about how the Cabinet Office’s strategy for managing the public interest in that transparency is hopelessly flawed.

It’s now up to the ICO to decide whether it will disclose the name of Sunak’s fund manager to us when it receives the information from the Cabinet Office. How can we be satisfied there is no abuse of public powers if we cannot know what investments a minister holds?

As an exercise in guarding against ministerial conflicts of interest, blind trusts are a joke. But for the tax-paying public, their consequence, the potential for abuse of ministerial powers for private gain, is no laughing matter. We are very pleased about this decision.

When it comes to fighting to protect democracy, we never give up. It’s because of this persistence that we managed to expose industrial-scale corruption, such as the Conservative government’s unlawful PPE VIP lane during the pandemic.

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