And it's a question I took to Credit Suisse, and I took to SoftBank as a journalist many times. It was so startlingly problematic. In the end, The Bond & Credit Co. was taken over by a company -- Japanese insurer, Tokio Marine. And when Tokio Marine got involved, they looked at The Bond & Credit Co's exposure to Greensill and the Green -- the funds that were investing in Greensill assets. And they said, hey, this is too much. We don't want to do this anymore. And that really spelled the end, right, because without that insurance, the funds that have invested in Greensill's assets, they're no longer able to go out to the same pool of investors. Richard Reed, the news editor at the Henley Standard while Johnson was MP, said the local paper, like many constituents, did not seem particularly bothered by stories about his affairs in the national press. “We didn’t bother with it,” he said. “It’s not what the Henley Standard does. We were a pretty parochial paper in many ways and we didn’t really like bad news.” Many of them, they are never going to see the amount that they had put into it,” Guth said. “But they will be able to benefit from some of it. And some of it may be better than nothing at all.” Johnson ran the Spectator as he ended up running the London mayoralty. He presided, but as far as day-to-day matters were concerned, relied heavily on his deputy, Stuart Reid, not least to make sense of an often chaotic commissioning process where some writers were left wondering if pieces urgently demanded by Johnson would ever be published. Mr Johnson last week issued a “humble and sincere” apology to Lord Geidt, his ethics adviser, for withholding the messages from an inquiry. Tory sleaze

NATHAN HUNT: One of the things that Greensill focused on, very early on in his career was the idea of supply chain finance, the possibilities of supply chain finance. Certainly, Greensill didn't invent this. It's been around for a long time. I'm wondering if you can tell me a bit about what is supply chain finance? DUNCAN MAVIN: That is also a very, very good question. So Lex comes across the government. He makes his government connections from around about 2011. He had met a very senior former Civil Servant named Jeremy Heywood, when he was at Morgan Stanley. They both worked together there. At that point, Lex was a pretty junior guy and Jeremy Heywood was a very senior guy, very high-level Civil Servant who'd moved into the bank temporarily. NATHAN HUNT: A final question, Duncan. You also became a character in the Greensill story, an unwilling character, but a character. As you were investigating Greensill for Dow Jones and for your book, what was your experience with them? DUNCAN MAVIN: Yes. I mean I think that's also another really important point. And I think it's always very tempting with these kind of white collar scandals to think that there are no victims, but there are victims here, not least the 1,000 or so Greensill employees who lost their jobs. So Credit Suisse's role was to provide the funding for these supply chain finance transactions and other loans, although they might argue they didn't know that's what was happening. Despite these concerns, with a safe and prosperous seat, getting to the House of Commons was never going to be difficult; his majority in 2001 was 8,458 over the Liberal Democrats, rising to 12,793 in the following election. Labour was in power throughout, so there was no requirement to defend unpopular government policies.And so they're kind of leaning on each other. And if you take one -- takes the other away, then it all collapses. At Greensill Capital, absolutely Lex and the other executives know that this is a problem. They discuss it all the time in management meetings, how are they going to kind of get out of this problem. Lex being the optimist at all these management meetings will say, leave it to me, I've got it sorted, we'll outgrow this. Of course, they couldn't.

The past few months have proven difficult for the Prime Minister, with Mr Johnson forced to face a series of lobbying scandals within his own party that refreshed accusations of “Tory sleaze”. I think things could certainly have been handled better, let me put it that way, by me,” he said in November. When I started to look into it based on this documentation I received, I realized Greensill was the story. And it didn't really take an awful lot of digging to figure that out. I mean in the end, I think you made several million pounds. It's unclear exactly how much Cameron was paid, but certainly a substantial amount of money. I think there was also, for Cameron may be, an appeal that this was a fast-growing fintech in theory. And so that's a bit more exciting than going to work on the Board of an established company. A bit cooler, a bit more kind of future of Britain. And so I think there's an appeal. What's interesting to me is that the red flags around Greensill were pretty easy to spot by then.The Pyramid of Lies is not elegantly written. The breathless tone of some descriptions verges on comical: the Savoy, where Greensill holds a breakfast meeting, is “a 130-year-old art deco masterpiece, dubbed London’s 'most famous hotel’ and renowned as a favoured haunt of kings and presidents, Hollywood stars and fashionistas”. It is nonetheless worth reading as a meticulously researched and enjoyably lively account of this major financial scandal. And this source said to me, well, you really should and sort of provided me with a little bit of documentation, and I started to look into them they were connected to a scandal that was kind of emerging at a company called GAM, a Swiss asset manager, somebody called a hedge fund. And Greensill was sort of part of that story, but a very minor part of it, at least that's how it was portrayed in most reporting on it. When the company finally collapsed it exposed the revolving door between Westminster and big business and how David Cameron was allowed to lobby ministers for cash that would save Greensill's doomed business. Instead, Credit Suisse and Japan's SoftBank are nursing billions of dollars in losses, a German bank is under criminal investigation, and thousands of jobs are at risk. DUNCAN MAVIN: That's a great question. So I -- yes, you're right, I've been following this for probably about 4 years now, maybe a little longer than that. And at the time -- I've been a financial journalist for a long time. I was a chartered accountant before that. So just so you know where I'm coming from. But at the time, I wasn't writing an awful lot. I was doing a bit more editing and managing people. And a source -- a longtime source of mine came to me and said, hey, are you paying attention to this company called Greensill Capital? And I said, no, never heard of them. In the centuries since, factoring became part of the supply chains that grew around the world, oiled by liquidity. As these operations became faster and more complex they needed not just factoring but reverse factoring, in which people sell their debt, rather than their credit, and each agent in the chain is paid straight away. The process became computerised, and modern global trade now runs on a silent river of digitised debt.

Matthew Cole, who has taken over as editor, said, ‘ Pyramid of Lies is a classic tale of ambition, greed and hubris, updated for the globalized twenty-first century. What Bad Blood did for Silicon Valley and The Smartest Guys in the Room did for Wall Street, The Pyramid of Lies will do for the world of shadow banking and supply chain finance. Duncan’s jaw-dropping account reads like a thriller and I can’t wait for others to discover it.’ When the company finally collapsed it exposed the revolving door between Westminster and big business and how David Cameron was allowed to lobby ministers for cash that would save Greensill’s doomed business. Instead, Credit Suisse and Japan’s SoftBank are nursing billions of dollars in losses, a German bank is under criminal investigation, and thousands of jobs are at risk. It just became too big. And such a major part of Greensill's business was heavily reliant on what Sanjeev Gupta was up to. And that business now is under investigation by the SFO in the U.K. And so clearly, there was a problem there. To its founder, Greensill Capital is more than a business: his whole new identity depends upon it. As the story unfolds, we see his drive and determination evolve fatally into messianic ambition and a blinkered disregard for differing views. Greensill found it difficult to make any money doing it, and so started to finance riskier borrowers, taking out credit insurance to obviate the higher risk of default. The insurance allowed the loans to be marketed, misleadingly, as low-risk to investors.DUNCAN MAVIN: Yes. They were a very difficult group of people to deal with because Lex had this tendency to say things that weren't true. It's unusual in my experience that people will outright lie to your face as a journalist. In this case, there were people around Greensill who were doing that regularly. And not just Lex Greensill, not just his PR person, his spokesperson, but also lawyers who were acting for Greensill Capital and so on, would tell me things that later turned out to not be true or deny things that I took to them and tell me that I was wrong, only for it later to become apparent that I wasn't wrong. And as you say, in one form or another, it's been around for a long time. In the last I guess, now 25 years or so, there have been various forms of this that have developed that fund it in different ways. In particular Lex's particular slant on this was that he would fund it through selling these loans essentially to investors. So unlike a bank, which is funding this from its own balance sheet, Lex doesn't have a balance sheet. So he goes out to investment funds and says, look, I can provide you with some kind of yield by funding these transactions. So he grew up in a fairly remote part of Australia, a place called Bundaberg, which is a farming community. His grandfather had started a farm there in the 1940s. And Lex was kind of second, third generation, who was running this farm, mostly farming, sweet potatoes and water melons and things like that. He was clearly kind of a bright guy, a little bit nerdy possibly at school and a sort of fairly rough macho environment that meant he stood out a little bit.

DUNCAN MAVIN: Yes, sure. Yes, he comes across that very early on in his career. So in his early 20s, in Australia actually working for a businessman there who had ideas about supply chain finance and the technology that could really sort of drive supply chain finance at that time, and he sort of developed his ideas around it through his career in Morgan Stanley and Citigroup and also working for the U.K. government as an adviser there. Mr Johnson initially defended Mr Paterson, before later admitting the move had been a “total mistake”. NATHAN HUNT: The book, once again, The Pyramid Of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Billion-Dollar Scandal. Duncan, thank you for joining me today on the podcast. Speaking of his wife, Pullen said: “Maggie was always surprised that the ladies of Henley didn’t criticise him for his affairs. In fact, most of them would always say that it was Marina’s fault.”DUNCAN MAVIN: This is also kind of really key to Lex Greensill, right? So you and I might call out a lie. He might say, well, look, I was in the White House, and I gave some advice. So is it really a lie? I think this is also -- you're getting to the heart of one of the real problems with exactly this sort of business. And by this sort of business, I mean, fast-growing tech businesses with kind of visionary founders where there is a reward for them to saying -- making outlandish claims, pushing their reputation and their ambitions as far as it will possibly. Pressed on the issue during a Q&A session with journalists, Mr Johnson said: “I didn’t say anything about Turkey in the referendum … Since I made no remarks, I can’t disown them.” Wallpapergate Carrie Symonds was reportedly horrified at the ‘John Lewis furniture nightmare’ left behind by the Prime Minister’s predecessor, Theresa May, though she has denied the claims (Photo: Reuters) And Sanjeev's looking for somebody who lend them some money and the 2, they have this kind of symbiotic relationship. So much so that at one point, Sanjeev Gupta is a major shareholder in Greensill Capital. So the 2 become really kind of intertwined and they start to really lean on each other, right? Like Greensill can't really grow without the revenue it gets from Sanjeev Gupta's businesses. And Sanjeev Gupta's businesses known as the GFG Alliance, they can't really grow without the money that Greensill is providing to it. It was not just the Cameron government. Credit Suisse and SoftBank fell for the patter and piled in billions. Mr Johnson’s early dismissal from The Times and his scandal while at The Telegraph did little to thwart his steady rise in journalism, with the writer becoming editor of The Spectator in 1999.