Following Heat Street’s report that Labour’s socialist leadership challenger Owen Smith accepted a £60,000 donation from City accountancy firm PwC, it seems only fair to bring to light Jeremy Corbyn’s recent brush with high finance.
Although Corbyn doesn’t declare it in the House of Commons Register of Members’ Interests, he has for a decade been a trustee of a north London charity called the Hanley Crouch Community Association.
It is used as a youth club, a line dancing club and also houses an arts and crafts group for the over 50s.
During Corbyn’s trusteeship the association has almost gone bust and once had to be bailed out with an emergency loan of £55,000 from Islington council.
Its latest accounts, filed with the Charity Commission in December, show it has returned to the black, with an annual income of £232,769.
But buried in those accounts – and not mentioned anywhere on its website – is the fact that it accepted a very generous £10,000 cash gift from the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi.
It is Japan’s largest bank, with capital stock of 1,711,958 million yen – or £12224319584.
Last year it made profits of more than 200 billion yen.
Corbyn is not normally a fan of big banks or their rich employees, as this speech from February 2016 shows:
But when the bank made its offer, it appears that he was prepared to put his rabidly anti-capitalist principles to one side.
I wonder what Karl Marx, from whom Corbyn says we can all learn a lot, would have to say about the acceptance of this Japanese cash?