Why is NHS England chaired by a banker who was instrumental in the collapse of banking giant Credit Suisse?

How the hell have we ended up with NHS England chaired by a banker with a significant role in the 2023 collapse of Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse?

Who promoted the idea of shortening medical degrees from 7 years to 4 in order to speed up the flow of doctors into the NHS, which has upset the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh among others.

TL:DR – The NHS has become a cash cow for private companies and bankers, as the Tory government has privatised NHS diagnostics and related life sciences-based services. That’s why NHS England is now chaired by a banker who was instrumental in the collapse of Credit Suisse.

Here’s a bit of a timeline, with info from Reuters and The Tribune.

In 2021 Credit Suisse’s shareholders started selling their shares, triggered by losses associated with the collapse of investment fund Archegos and Greensill Capital. This is the Greensill Capital that employed former Tory prime minister David Cameron—and collapsed in 2021 amid allegations of financial misbehaviour and fraud.

January 2022, Credit Suisse chairman Antonio Horta-Osorio resigned for breaching COVID-19 rules, just eight months after he was hired to fix the ailing bank.

Also in Jan 2022, Senior Tory and ex-banker Sajid Javid made the Credit Suisss Non-Executive Director Richard Meddings chair of NHS England. At Credit Suisse, Richard Meddings had chaired its risk committee before a series of financial scandals destroyed Credit Suisse in March 2023.

In July 2022, new CEO and restructuring expert Ulrich Koerner unveiled a strategic review – but failed to win over investors. An unsubstantiated rumour on an impending failure of the bank in the autumn sent customers fleeing.

In February 2023 Credit Suisse confirmed that clients had pulled 110 billion Swiss francs ($119 billion) of funds in the fourth quarter while the bank suffered its biggest annual loss of 7.29 billion Swiss francs since the financial crisis. In December, Credit Suisse had tapped investors for 4 billion Swiss francs.

Turns out NHS’ England’s Tory-appointed chair Richard Meddings was a key figure in the Credit Suisse collapse

Richard Meddings chaired the Credit Suisse risk committee before a series of financial scandals destroyed the bank: Credit Suisse was forced to admit the bank had identified ‘material weaknesses’ in internal controls over financial reporting. The bank stated that

‘[M]anagement did not design and maintain an effective risk assessment process to identify and analyse the risk of material misstatements in its financial statements.’

So the guy who helped wreck a huge Swiss bank is now in charge of wrecking the world’s biggest publicly-funded health service

As Credit Suisse collapsed, safe from his new perch as NHS England Chair Richard Meddings told the Social Market Foundation think-tank that the NHS staffing crisis could be solved by medically unqualified Physician Associates, who could fill NHS doctor vacancies; and that medical degrees should be shortened from 7 to 4 years, to speed up the flow of doctors into the NHS.

(The Social Market think tank is apparently a big cross-party think tank based in Westminster.

Dodgy financial reporting wasn’t Credit Suisse’s only problem during Richard Meddings’ tenure at the bank. There was also a dodgy Greensill connection.

Between 2017 and 2021, Credit Suisse encouraged and arranged for clients to invest in British financial services company Greensill Capital. 

Amid all the chaos and corruption of Boris Johnson’s government, in 2021 Greensill—which also employed former Tory prime minister David Cameron—collapsed amid allegations of financial misbehaviour and fraud. The Swiss financial regulator later ruled that Credit Suisse had ‘seriously breached its supervisory obligations’ in its relationship with the company’s owner, Lex Greensill, and his operations. They racked up around $10 billion of investment in Greensill, of which up to $2 billion may have disappeared.

The Cameron -Greensill connection is instructive about the web of financial wheeling and dealing that has grown up around the huge NHS public funding stream

In 2019 the NHS Long Term Plan gave a big shove to the revolving door between global life sciences and digital technology companies and NHS quangos. It spun even faster during the Tory government’s disaster capitalist response to the Covid 19 pandemic – as in: never let a good crisis go to waste.

CK999 reported in May 2020 how the UK government had taken advantage of the Covid-19 pandemic to hastily build a privatised testing/contact tracing system, outsourced to multinational companies, without going through the normal tendering process. This sidestepped existing NHS and Public Health England services, to the detriment of Covid-19 infection control.

Here’s where the story gets a bit convoluted, so best buckle up your seat belts. In the wake of this privatisation of NHS/public health diagnostics and contact tracing, the Tory government rapidly extended the privatisation of NHS diagnostics for other diseases and conditions too.

Including the Galleri test which is being run by Cancer Research UK and King’s College London Cancer Prevention Trials Unit, in partnership with NHS England and California cancer test start-up GRAIL, and with the support of eight NHS Cancer Alliances across England.

(Unsurprisingly a recent update on the first year results from the NHS-Galleri trial – which was set up despite the fact that Grail’s cancer test had not been cleared or approved in the USA by the Food and Drug Administration – shows they have failed to match up to the initial hype.)

GRAIL, the cancer test start-up, was the company that Rishi Sunak met in California at the end of 2021 – when, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he should have been dealing with the threat to the livelihoods of huge numbers of people working in the hospitality sector from the fast-growing Omicron wave of Covid 19.

And then there’s also the Cameron-Illumina-NHS-Galleri connection

At the time of Sunak’s visit, the US biosciences giant Illumina had acquired the GRAIL start up for $8bn. The deal was for Illumina to buy out investors, including Amazon.com Inc founder Jeff Bezos, to regain control of the company it had spun out five years before. Illumina expected the market value of the cancer test to be $75 billion in 2035.

But Illumina’s acquisition of GRAIL was messy and was challenged by both the USA’s Federal Trade Commission and the European Commission. (2023 update here.)

Illumina’s acquisition of GRAIL brings us back to the David Cameron – Greensill – Credit Suisse – Richard Meddings connection.

Former Tory Prime Minister David Cameron was employed by Illumina as its “adviser” from 2017, when he became a consultant and chairman of the company’s international advisory board.

But this information only emerged when Cameron listed Illumina as a ‘commercial interest’ in a statement issued following revelations of his lobbying of ministers on behalf of Lex Greensill.  Cameron made £7M from his employment by Greensill. 

We don’t know how much Illumina paid him, but Cameron seems to have been equally assiduous about lobbying for them.

The Times reported that in 2019 Cameron had lobbied Health Secretary Matt Hancock to accept Illumina’s invitation from Jay Flatley, Illumina’s executive chairman at the time, to attend a genomics summit in Hampshire. The Conference, co-hosted by Illumina and Genomics England, coincided with a £200m expansion in the UK government’s genomics sequencing programme.

A week after Hancock attended the summit, Genomics England – a company set up and owned by the Department of Health and Social Care – awarded Illumina a £123 million genetic-sequencing contract without competition. Awarded as a “Negotiated procedure without prior publication”, the contract was to set up a clinical Whole Genome Sequencing service in the NHS.

The contract was a follow-up to the 100,000 Genomes Project, instigated by Cameron when he was Prime Minister as a public/private partnership between Ilumina and Genomics England.

The deal was based on the unique value of the NHS to biosciences companies, by virtue of its inclusion of the whole UK population. This, together with the 70+ year medical records of the whole UK population, is the UK government’s big lure to US life sciences corporations. Basically, they are selling access to NHS patients to global corporations – without giving us a say in this.

In March 2021 Cameron met vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi to discuss genetic sequencing, and Illumina was given further contracts with Public Health England (as was) worth up to £870,000. Cameron’s meeting with Zahawi on behalf of Illumina raises further questions about the regulation and monitoring of lobbying activities by former Government employees. The records released by the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy do not declare Cameron’s commercial interest in the firm – while the minutes of the meeting are limited to a five-word sentence.

As this potted history indicates, the NHS is basically a cash cow for private companies and bankers and that’s why NHS England is chaired by a banker who was instrumental in the collapse of Credit Suisse

Privatisation of NHS diagnostics and other key life sciences services, through secretive contracts with global companies, has been enabled by Tory ministers – who themselves spun into position through the revolving door between banks and government, and will exit government back into the corporate wing of the corruptocracy.

That explains why NHS England is now chaired by a banker who was instrumental in the collapse of Credit Suisse.