Finance Lobbying Portal

Welcome to the Finance Lobbying Portal on Powerbase

Powerbase's Finance Lobbying Portal aims to guide you around some of the companies, lobbyists and think tanks involved in finance sector lobbying in the UK and the EU. Since the 2008 financial crash, British taxpayers have shelled out an incredible £1.2 trillion on bailing out and propping up the banks, according to the IMF. Six years on, the UK’s financial scandals appear never-ending. Money laundering, interest-rate rigging, product mis-selling, IT meltdowns, tax dodging, sanctions busting – few big names remain untainted. Despite all this, the City continues to enjoy a cosy relationship with our politicians and policymakers. Its intense lobbying alongside big business has helped rewrite corporate tax laws in its favour and push back against new regulations designed to prevent another crisis. The Conservative Party gets over half its funding from City financiers. Behind closed doors, ministers such as ex-banker Lord Sassoon, the former commercial secretary, make no secret of where loyalties lie. “This is a right of centre, market-driven government … a government with a number of bankers in its ranks, led by a Prime Minister who is proud to say he comes from a stockbroking family,” he told the British Bankers' Association at its inaugural summer lecture in June 2012. This portal is part of Powerbase—your guide to networks of power, lobbying and deceptive PR. Powerbase has a policy of strict referencing and is overseen by a Managing editor, a Sysop and several associate Portal editors. <youtube size="medium" align="right" caption=""Watch Spinwatch's video about the Big Four accountancy firms, their role in corporate tax avoidance and too cosy relationship with the UK government">xV3eHv_DbyA</youtube> <youtube size="medium" align="right" caption=""Watch Spinwatch's video on finance sector lobbying">kpbG3gmW7e0</youtube>

Spinwatch articles and reports Take a tour of some of the City of London's finance lobbying companies, industry lobbying groups and think tanks via the Finance sector lobbying map Spinwatch, Who really runs this place? film and report on tax avoidance, 17 June 2013 Tamasin Cave and Melissa Jones, What the bankers did next... a short film and new finance portal, Spinwatch, 15 October 2012 Tamasin Cave, We must fight back against these City lobbyists, Comment in The Guardian: 11 July 2012 Andy Rowell, The power of financial lobbyists must be curtailed and Exclusive: how Goldman Sachs rigs the game, Spinwatch, 20 March 2011 Reports Spinwatch Report:Who really runs this place?, pdf download, June 2013 Spinwatch, Doing God’s work: how Goldman Sachs rigs the game - investigation detailing Goldman Sachs’ secret lobbying activities in the UK and Brussels and links to politicians. March 2011 Spinwatch, An inside job: a snapshot of political schmoozing by the City, February 2010

Categories Related Powerbase categories: Finance sector lobbying Tax avoidance Revolving door Financial revolving door Banking and finance industry Conservative Party donors Priority pages Barclays HSBC Stephen Green Standard Chartered Lloyds Banking Group Royal Bank of Scotland British Bankers' Association

Getting Started Looking for somewhere to start? To learn how you can edit any article right now, visit Powerbase:About, Welcome, newcomers, our Help page, Frequently Asked Questions, A quick guide to editing or experiment in the sandbox. Or contribute a new article: go to Quick Guide to Getting Started. Research and Writing Tips How to research front groups | Resources for studying propaganda | Research using the web Can you help? Powerbase can be made more effective if more people join the project. If you have research or writing skills or just spare time, you can help. If you are unsure where to start, you could expand some of the recently created but currently very brief articles. (If you look at the recent changes page you will see some noted as being 'stubs' - articles that may just be a line or two and needing to be fleshed out). So if you would like to add to some of those you would be most welcome. There is an automatically updated page which includes the pages which have been signalled by Powerbase users as most wanted. In addition there is a page which includes a list of Things you can do to help. Or if you would like some other suggestions closer to your interests you could drop Powerbase editor, David Miller an email. His address is editor AT Powerbase.info Start Here View The Latest Articles View Articles By Category View The Most Popular Articles Create An Account Or Log In Change Your Preferences Write a new Article

Powerbase history Powerbase is a collaborative venture initiated by Spinwatch in collaboration with Lobbywatch, GM Watch Red Star Research and Corporate Watch, but put into effect by a wide variety of volunteers and independent researchers. Contributors are now working on 19,432 articles. Disclaimer: Powerbase is an encyclopedia of people, issues and groups shaping the public agenda. It is a project of the Spinwatch—email editor AT Powerbase.info. Antispam note: To avoid attracting spam email robots, email addresses on Powerbase are written with AT in place of the usual symbol, and we have removed "mail to" links. Replace AT with the correct symbol to get a valid address. We regret the inconvenience this entails. Campaign for more effective antispam regulations. Read the full disclaimer References