If we can pull off [a public listing]”, Lex Greensill says in early 2020, “me and my brother will be the richest men in Australia”; just over a year later, he tells one of his major shareholders, “It’s over... I’m ashamed for what I’ve done to my family name”. As ever, the dream dies gradually, then suddenly. Exercise due diligence in selecting investments and the people with whom you invest—in other words, do your homework. And he was clearly really, really ambitious. In his retelling later, and he told this story many, many times, what motivated him to get into supply chain finance. This is his version of events, was watching his parents struggle to get paid on time. So producing their agricultural produce and selling it to supermarkets who then failed to pay until 3 months later or 9 months later or [ over ] a long end. And that sort of left his parents short for a while. And so that in his retelling was that motivated him to say, I'm going to do this in a little guy. I'm going to sort this problem out. I mean in the end, I think you made several million pounds. It's unclear exactly how much Cameron was paid, but certainly a substantial amount of money. I think there was also, for Cameron may be, an appeal that this was a fast-growing fintech in theory. And so that's a bit more exciting than going to work on the Board of an established company. A bit cooler, a bit more kind of future of Britain. And so I think there's an appeal. What's interesting to me is that the red flags around Greensill were pretty easy to spot by then. And so that's part of what he's doing. The other piece of it is to say, hey, I've got this super duper new technology, which will make this thing run a lot more smoothly. The reality actually was slightly different. The technology mostly wasn't Greensill Capital, there was very little technology at Greensill at all. And he was relying largely on third-party technology platforms. And the other reality that was different was that much of Greensill's business was not supply chain finance at all. It was just lending, unsecured lending usually to risky companies.

DUNCAN MAVIN: Yes, that's right. So many of these supply chain finance assets, the biggest insurers in particular, the pension funds and so on, they can't invest in them because they're not investment grade. And so the way you make the investment grade is you take out trade credit insurance, and that makes them investable for a much broader group of investors. The trouble for Lex was a lot of the big trade credit insurers wouldn't work with him. They met him over the years, and they dealt with them over the years and found they didn't like the way we did business. NATHAN HUNT: The book, once again, The Pyramid Of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Billion-Dollar Scandal. Duncan, thank you for joining me today on the podcast. DUNCAN MAVIN: That's a great question. So I -- yes, you're right, I've been following this for probably about 4 years now, maybe a little longer than that. And at the time -- I've been a financial journalist for a long time. I was a chartered accountant before that. So just so you know where I'm coming from. But at the time, I wasn't writing an awful lot. I was doing a bit more editing and managing people. And a source -- a longtime source of mine came to me and said, hey, are you paying attention to this company called Greensill Capital? And I said, no, never heard of them. And so suddenly, you see sort of vast amounts of assets pouring into these Credit Suisse funds. In truth, just to echo what I said a little bit earlier, in truth, it wasn't just supply chain finance assets. It was, in fact, kind of loans to risky businesses, some of them complex steel businesses run by Sanjeev Gupta. And so this is Credit Suisse's clients' money. Some of it's pension fund money, some of it's big sovereign wealth fund money. Some of it's money from individual private clients. And as you say, in one form or another, it's been around for a long time. In the last I guess, now 25 years or so, there have been various forms of this that have developed that fund it in different ways. In particular Lex's particular slant on this was that he would fund it through selling these loans essentially to investors. So unlike a bank, which is funding this from its own balance sheet, Lex doesn't have a balance sheet. So he goes out to investment funds and says, look, I can provide you with some kind of yield by funding these transactions.And Lex, like some of the others in Silicon Valley, he was very keen to be seen as a visionary, very keen to sort of align himself with very important global politicians and financiers and so on because he knew that there was a lot of value in doing that. And I think if you look at what he claimed with the Obama White House, it was -- that was part for him of saying, look, I'm a really big, important powerful player. I mean in the end, right, like Lex Greensill's company was valued at several billion dollars. And part of the reason for that was because he was making these outlandish claims. DUNCAN MAVIN: Yes, sure. Yes, he comes across that very early on in his career. So in his early 20s, in Australia actually working for a businessman there who had ideas about supply chain finance and the technology that could really sort of drive supply chain finance at that time, and he sort of developed his ideas around it through his career in Morgan Stanley and Citigroup and also working for the U.K. government as an adviser there. NATHAN HUNT: A final question, Duncan. You also became a character in the Greensill story, an unwilling character, but a character. As you were investigating Greensill for Dow Jones and for your book, what was your experience with them?

It just became too big. And such a major part of Greensill's business was heavily reliant on what Sanjeev Gupta was up to. And that business now is under investigation by the SFO in the U.K. And so clearly, there was a problem there. DUNCAN MAVIN: Yes. I mean I think that's also another really important point. And I think it's always very tempting with these kind of white collar scandals to think that there are no victims, but there are victims here, not least the 1,000 or so Greensill employees who lost their jobs. So Credit Suisse's role was to provide the funding for these supply chain finance transactions and other loans, although they might argue they didn't know that's what was happening. When the company finally collapsed it exposed the revolving door between Westminster and big business and how David Cameron was allowed to lobby ministers for cash that would save Greensill's doomed business. Instead, Credit Suisse and Japan's SoftBank are nursing billions of dollars in losses, a German bank is under criminal investigation, and thousands of jobs are at risk. The Pyramid of Lies is not elegantly written. The breathless tone of some descriptions verges on comical: the Savoy, where Greensill holds a breakfast meeting, is “a 130-year-old art deco masterpiece, dubbed London’s 'most famous hotel’ and renowned as a favoured haunt of kings and presidents, Hollywood stars and fashionistas”. It is nonetheless worth reading as a meticulously researched and enjoyably lively account of this major financial scandal. He gets business cards with Downing Street that [indiscernible] (00:09:13) and that kind of thing. He holds meetings in Downing Street, really kind of pushes it beyond -- his role beyond what it really ought to have been. But it seems to work for him. And certainly, when Cameron leaves office, he leaves having left Lex with a much higher profile than he had previously.DUNCAN MAVIN: Yes, I think that's right. I think this is -- it's tempting sometimes to see these big kind of corporate scandals in terms of big systems and institutions. But at the heart of this one, is the guy Lex Greensill. And he's fascinating, a really divisive character. Some people I talked to said Lex is really charismatic and a genius. And other people I talked to said, stay away from Lex, things are going to go wrong. The Cameron government’s endorsement mattered commercially. Whitehall awarded Greensill contracts “for projects Greensill had proposed when working in Whitehall”. Greensill used the CBE the Conservatives gave him as a quality assurance mark, and in 2018 bagged the former prime minister himself.