Lex Greensill boasted of company’s ‘enormous’ liquidity before collapse
Lex Greensill boasted to staff that his company had “enormous” liquidity just three weeks before the finance firm collapsed into insolvency, according to reports.
The Australian financier reassured Greensill Capital staff in an internal video on 15 February that a funds held by Credit Suisse were robust, the Financial Times reported.
“We’ve got enormous amounts of liquidity that are available to us, for our assets in the funds,” Greensill said. “The markets are very much behind us.”
He also explained that the company was on the brink of finalising a new insurance policy.
The firm went bust weeks ago, after large customers including Sanjeev Gupta’s GFG Alliance defaulted on their loans, leaving UK taxpayers on the hook for hundreds of millions.
The majority of the company’s more than 1,000 employees were made redundant shortly after it filed for administration.
Chancellor Rishi Sunak faced questions yesterday over why the failed finance firm was chosen to give out emergency Covid loans despite not being regulated as stringently as banks.
Greensill Capital, which counted David Cameron as a senior adviser, was the only non-bank financial firm that was chosen by the government to administer the emergency coronavirus loan schemes.
Cameron is accused of lobbying ministers to hand out emergency support for the firm. He is reported to have told friends he was set to earn as much as £60m from shareholdings in the company, where he had worked since 2018.