The wood-panelled, chandeliered dining rooms of the Savoy hotel across the road became the office canteen DUNCAN MAVIN: That is also a very, very good question. So Lex comes across the government. He makes his government connections from around about 2011. He had met a very senior former Civil Servant named Jeremy Heywood, when he was at Morgan Stanley. They both worked together there. At that point, Lex was a pretty junior guy and Jeremy Heywood was a very senior guy, very high-level Civil Servant who'd moved into the bank temporarily. Cameron was an authentic member of the upper class who might polish him up. After he destroyed his career and the country’s prospects by taking the UK out of the EU by mistake, Cameron yearned for a comfort Lex Greensill could offer him: obscene amounts of money.

And Sanjeev's looking for somebody who lend them some money and the 2, they have this kind of symbiotic relationship. So much so that at one point, Sanjeev Gupta is a major shareholder in Greensill Capital. So the 2 become really kind of intertwined and they start to really lean on each other, right? Like Greensill can't really grow without the revenue it gets from Sanjeev Gupta's businesses. And Sanjeev Gupta's businesses known as the GFG Alliance, they can't really grow without the money that Greensill is providing to it.During that time and despite holding two jobs for much of it, Johnson wrote and wrote. Perhaps most notably, in Friends, Voters, Countrymen, he said that despite his Euroscepticism, he believed the UK’s interests were “on balance served by maintaining our [EU] membership”. NATHAN HUNT: One of the things that Greensill focused on, very early on in his career was the idea of supply chain finance, the possibilities of supply chain finance. Certainly, Greensill didn't invent this. It's been around for a long time. I'm wondering if you can tell me a bit about what is supply chain finance? 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. Matthew Cole, who has taken over as editor, said, ‘ Pyramid of Lies is a classic tale of ambition, greed and hubris, updated for the globalized twenty-first century. What Bad Blood did for Silicon Valley and The Smartest Guys in the Room did for Wall Street, The Pyramid of Lies will do for the world of shadow banking and supply chain finance. Duncan’s jaw-dropping account reads like a thriller and I can’t wait for others to discover it.’ 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.

NATHAN HUNT: Duncan, you've been following the Greensill story for years. I'm wondering how early did you know that this story wasn't going to end well? And for a form of Prime Minister who really only has his reputation to sell his credibility and his reputation to have put it all on this company, which was already showing some serious red flags, that was a really strange move.When I started to look into it based on this documentation I received, I realized Greensill was the story. And it didn't really take an awful lot of digging to figure that out. 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. NATHAN HUNT: Sadly, the losers from Greensill's collapse extend beyond just a few venture capitalists and private equity investors. What was Credit Suisse's role in spreading the exposure to Greensill? And this source said to me, well, you really should and sort of provided me with a little bit of documentation, and I started to look into them they were connected to a scandal that was kind of emerging at a company called GAM, a Swiss asset manager, somebody called a hedge fund. And Greensill was sort of part of that story, but a very minor part of it, at least that's how it was portrayed in most reporting on it. 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.