Did David Cameron know Greensill was about to collapse?

On the day that senior Treasury officials and the Bank of England revealed quite how much David Cameron lobbied them last spring on behalf of Greensill for access to emergency loan schemes, I want to share important disclosures made in recent weeks that suggest Greensill was heading for collapse over many months.

These represent the financial – as opposed to the political – side of this debacle, which has largely been ignored because of widespread outrage at the way David Cameron exploited his connections in government and the civil service to lobby for Greensill’s cause.

What I want to focus on is what I see as the big unanswered question, for Greensill’s eponymous founder, Lex Greensill, for David Cameron, for regulators, for politicians: precisely how long before Greensill collapsed formally into insolvency in March did they know of its parlous state?

This really matters, because all through last spring Cameron and Greensill were piling pressure on the Treasury and Bank of England for Greensill to have access to funding from taxpayers through an important credit scheme, the Covid Corporate Financing Facility.