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Cryptocurrency firm Copper secured a meeting with Treasury officials following a weekend phone call between a UK government minister and former chancellor Lord Philip Hammond, then an adviser to the company.
The crypto company was invited to meet finance ministry civil servants in February 2022, within days of a conversation between Hammond and John Glen, then economic secretary.
Glen, who has since been promoted to chief secretary to the Treasury, was “keen for Treasury to engage”, according to documents obtained via a Freedom of Information request.
The call between Hammond and Glen did not have to be publicly listed in routine government transparency publications, nor did the meeting because no ministers attended, highlighting what campaigners have described as weaknesses in the UK government’s disclosure rules.
During the meeting, Copper highlighted the need for “public assurances” that the UK welcomed crypto businesses, the documents show.
At the time, Copper faced difficulties obtaining a full licence to trade in Britain, having been granted a temporary licence by the Financial Conduct Authority in late 2020.
The phone call between Hammond and Glen occurred after the end of a usual two-year ban on lobbying government imposed on ministers when they leave office.
Hammond told the Financial Times that “as a matter of principle” he did not ask Glen, a former colleague whom he counts as a friend, to set up a meeting for Copper.
Sue Hawley, executive director of Spotlight on Corruption, a campaign group that obtained the emails and notes around Copper’s meetings with the Treasury, said they showed that transparency rules needed to be strengthened.
“Informal contacts and policy engagement such as this must be better reflected in government transparency returns so that the public can understand who is influencing government policy,” she said.
The independent Committee on Standards in Public Life, the ethics watchdog, recommended in 2021 that informal approaches that are given substantive consideration by government officials should be included in the government’s transparency publications.
Its recommendation was echoed by the Boardman review, launched in the wake of the Greensill lobbying scandal in 2021, which found that “even a single, brief conversation with a . . . former colleague on a sensitive subject should be considered for disclosure”.
In response, the government said in July this year that it would widen transparency disclosures to include diarised phone calls. But it noted impromptu phone calls alone did not “evidence a substantive lobbying engagement” and would not need to be disclosed unless such an informal approach was granted government time and resources.
The opposition Labour party has said it will ban former ministers from lobbying the government for at least five years if it wins the next general election.
Few details of what was discussed in the meetings between the Treasury and Copper are public. The documents released under FOI were extensively redacted, with the government citing exemptions to FOI laws around commercial confidentiality and government policy decision-making.
However, a readout of the meeting shows that when Treasury officials asked Copper what the UK could do to support its growth, the company suggested “public assurances that crypto/blockchain businesses are welcome in the UK”.
In June 2022, Copper withdrew its FCA application, having been granted a registration under Switzerland’s anti-money laundering regime, where companies are overseen by self-regulatory bodies.
Hammond — who now chairs Copper — in January blamed the FCA’s slowness on Copper’s decision to relocate its client base to Switzerland, warning that the UK was falling behind EU countries as a financial centre for digital assets.
The FCA, which supervises cryptoasset firms under anti-money laundering regulation, declined to comment on individual companies but said the “number of good quality applications” it received continued to be low.
The Treasury said it met “many crypto firms every year to help understand the sector and shape best policy that is proportionate and safe. The independent FCA is responsible for authorising individual companies and no one at the Treasury would seek to influence this process.”
Copper did not respond to requests for comment.
