Gosh he has done rather well, Lord Drayson donated £50,000 to Labour had a quango pay his firm millions which he then sold and now he has landed a cushy cabinet job....A Labour donor made a vast personal fortune on the back of a £20million handout of taxpayers' money, an inquiry has found.
Lord Drayson had threatened to pull his PowderJect company out of Britain unless it was given public cash.
In 2003 the vaccine manufacturer was offered the £20million to build a factory by a government-run regional development board.
Just two months later he sold the subsidised company to its U.S. rival Chiron, landing a profit for himself and his family estimated at £80million.
He is now a science minister and, following last week's reshuffle, also a defence minister attending Cabinet meetings. The affair raises disturbing questions over Labour's burgeoning quango network and the way it handles large sums of public money in deep secrecy.
At a time of widespread anger over MPs' misuse of their expenses, it led to calls yesterday for better scrutiny of the way taxpayers' money is spent by unaccountable bureaucrats.
The North West Regional Development Agency, which channelled money to the Drayson firm, is one of nine RDAs which between them have spent more than £15billion.
An official report on the PowderJect deal, which the North West RDA commissioned but unsurprisingly decided not to publish, finds that the takeover which made Lord Drayson's fortune was 'significantly influenced' by the handout from the quango.
It adds that the grant produced a less-than- expected return for the public.
New Labour happy to reward those who make donations to the party.
From Wikipedia: Following his elevation to the House of Lords, made a working peer entitled Baron Drayson, of Kensington in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, in May 2004, he gave the Labour Party another £500,000, raising allegations that his peerage had been "bought".
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