City mogul Victor Blank gave Rachel Reeves £175,000 donations
Control: Chancellor Rachel Reeves
Rachel Reeves has received £175,000 in donations from City mogul Sir Victor Blank, a former chairman of TSB.
Sir Victor was at the helm when Lloyds was strong-armed by the last Labor government to rescue the Halifax Bank of Scotland during the financial crisis.
A long-time Labor supporter, he gave the money to her Westminster office between 2021 and 2023, when Reeves was shadow chancellor.
The news comes as questions continue to arise over her role at HBoS when it was taken over by Lloyds in a £20 billion taxpayer-funded bailout in 2008.
Reeves initially said she worked as an economist at HBOS before entering politics. But her profile on the social networking site LinkedIn was changed to reflect that her job was in retail banking.
The update has sparked criticism that she was trying to exaggerate her role at a lender that nearly went bankrupt during her time there.
Reeves also worked as an economist at the Bank of England for six years before joining HBOS in 2006. She had previously claimed she had spent “a decade” at the Bank.
Conservative MP Richard Holden has written to Reeves asking for more clarity about her employment history. “The allegations that your CV may not be accurate are incredibly serious and would raise significant concerns about your ability to be honest with the British public, concerns that your budget has already raised,” he wrote.
Reeves has come under fire for her tax and spending budget, which included a £25 billion increase in employers’ National Insurance contributions, which was not in the Labor manifesto.
It is believed she first met Sir Victor after leaving the HBoS and becoming an MP in 2010.
He stopped donating to Labor five years later, but resumed donations after Reeves became shadow chancellor in 2021.
She is the only MP to have received his largesse since then. As chairman of Lloyds TSB, Sir Victor was addressed at a reception in 2008 by Prime Minister Gordon Brown and encouraged to buy HBoS, which had been brought down by loose lending, poor risk management and a lack of liquidity.
Sir Victor, who is also a former chairman of media group Trinity Mirror, left Lloyds TSB the following year after the shotgun wedding was consummated.
A Treasury source said Reeves “worked in retail banking covering a variety of areas, drawing on her background as an economist.”
A PvdA spokesperson said: ‘All donations have been declared in the usual way in accordance with the rules.’
Sir Victor was contacted for comment.
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