Sunak’s Covid start-up fund invested nearly £2m in luxury underwear firm linked to his wife

From the Guardian website this afternoon:

Rishi Sunak’s controversial fund to support start-ups during the Covid pandemic invested nearly £2m in companies linked to his wife, Guardian analysis has found.

Carousel Ventures, a company part-owned by Akshata Murty's venture capital firm, got an investment of £250,000 from the Future Fund to help fund its ownership of a luxury underwear business called Heist Studios, it can be disclosed.

It is the fourth business linked to Murty revealed to have received an investment from the fund set up by Sunak to support start-ups when he was chancellor during the Covid pandemic.

None of Murty's investments that benefited from the Future Fund appear publicly on Sunak’s register of ministerial interests.

This, the paper goes on to say, is just one of 17 shareholdings that have been held by Murty or her venture capital company Catamaran Ventures UK at during Sunak’s time as chancellor or prime minister. He has voluntarily disclosed none of them.

At best this shows a complete disregard for disregard the rules about the disclosure of financial interests. At worst it is corruption.

This is where 13 years of Conservative government - or, more accurately, the eight years since the end of the Coalition - have left us.

I am also reminded of P.G. Wodehouse's The Code of the Woosters. As Christopher Hitchens once wrote:

In the climactic scene of The Code of the Woosters, Bertie confronts Sir Roderick Spode, the sinister bully who is "founder and head of the Saviours of Britain, a Fascist organization better known as the Black Shorts." He reduces Spode to a jelly by disclosing that he knows the would-be dictator's ghastly secret - his ownership of Eulalie Soeurs, a female underwear consortium.