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Bain & Company, the consultancy that until earlier this year was barred from taking on new work for the UK government, has hired a former minister as a paid adviser on a project for Saudi Arabia’s ministry of investment.
The appointment of Lord Gerry Grimstone, an unpaid minister for investment from March 2020 to July 2022, was approved this month by the Whitehall watchdog that reviews whether appointments of former ministers comply with rules designed to safeguard government independence.
In March the UK lifted a ban on Bain winning government contracts that had been imposed in August 2022 because of the consultancy’s role in a major South Africa corruption scandal.
Grimstone, a former chair of Barclays, has accepted multiple roles since leaving government, including a paid role for Equilibrium Global, a company working for Bahrain’s Economic Development Board.
In a letter published on its website, the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, advised that the risks posed by the role with Bain could be “appropriately mitigated” if Grimstone followed several conditions during the work.
Grimstone met officials from Saudi Arabia during his time in office and made decisions that affected the country, according to information provided to the committee by the UK government.
The committee said officials had told it that Grimstone had made “frequent decisions relating to the economic/investment relationship between the United Kingdom and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, particularly with the Saudi Minister for Investment”.
It also noted the government’s comments that “these decisions would have been superseded by subsequent decisions or the final decision was made by the prime minister at the time”.
Grimstone had also pursued “an investment partnership” with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and while this had been unsuccessful during his time as a minister, the efforts were continuing “in a slightly different format”, according to the letter.
The conditions imposed by the committee included that he should not draw on any privileged information available to him from his time as a minister and that for two years after leaving his ministerial post he should not lobby the UK government on Bain’s behalf. The committee said it “considered the risk of this work being offered as a reward for decisions made, or actions taken in office, as low”.
Grimstone’s role with Bain was first reported by the Times newspaper.
In August 2022, the Cabinet Office banned Bain from winning public contracts for three years over its role in a “state capture” scandal in South Africa and what Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Cabinet Office minister at the time, called “grave professional misconduct, which renders its integrity questionable”.
Bain subsequently launched a legal challenge before the ban was lifted in April 2023.
Lord Peter Hain, the veteran anti-apartheid campaigner and former Labour cabinet minister who spearheaded a campaign against Bain over its work in South Africa, said it was “a classic gamekeeper-turned-poacher [situation] for a minister to be allowed to do this”.
Bain & Co confirmed that Grimstone had accepted a role “as an adviser to our Middle East team”.
Grimstone did not respond to a request for comment.
