A general view of staff on a NHS hospital ward at Ealing Hospital in London
Campaigners slam conflict of interest over top health official’s Palantir ties at time of NHS bidding
HEALTH campaigners demanded the government put an end to the “dizzying revolving door of corruption” after it was revealed today that a top health official had close ties with Palantir while it was bidding for a £330 million contract with the NHS.
Samantha Jones, the Department of Health and Social Care’s most senior civil servant, was an adviser to a partner of the controversial US surveillance tech firm at the time of the patient record contract.
A permanent secretary at the DHSC, Ms Jones was also acting as an adviser to health consultancy Carnall Farrar, which is part of a consortium with Palantir, according to the Financial Times.
Keep Our NHS Public co-chairman Dr Tony O’Sullivan slammed the government, saying: “The revolving door of official corruption is dizzying.”
“It is important to expose it,” he told the Morning Star. “The links — between public servants, consultancies who advise both Palantir and government at the same time — stink of legal corruption.
“The stables must be swept clean, unethical links exposed, the Palantir contract ended, and a change of direction established to invest wholly and ethically in the publicly provided NHS.”
Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange during morning trading on March 18, 2026 in New York City. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
“Who was it? Trump? A family member? A White House staffer?” asked US Sen. Chris Murphy.
Just minutes before US President Donald Trump momentarily boosted the stock market—and sent oil prices tumbling—with his disputed Monday announcement of peace talks with Iran, unknown traders loaded up on positions that allowed them to profit from the resulting movement in equities and commodities.
The Financial Times reported that “roughly 6,200 Brent and West Texas Intermediate futures contracts changed hands between 6:49 am and 6:50 am New York time on Monday, just a quarter of an hour ahead of the US president’s post on Truth Social that there had in recent days been ‘productive conversations’ with Tehran to end the war in Iran.”
FT added that the notional value of those trades was $580 million.
“Trading volumes for Brent and WTI leapt at the same time, 27 seconds before 6:50 am,” the newspaper reported. “Futures tracking the S&P 500 share index jumped in price moments after the oil trade, with volumes also rising significantly during that timeframe. It was not known whether one entity or several entities were behind Monday’s trades.”
An unnamed trader at a “major hedge fund” told FT that “my gut from watching markets for the last 25 years is this is really abnormal.”
“It’s Monday morning, there’s no important data today, there aren’t any Fed speakers you’d want to front-run. It’s an unusually large trade for a day with no event risk,” the trader said. “Somebody just got a lot richer.”
A BBC review of market data similarly found that “traders bet hundreds of millions of dollars on oil contracts just minutes before” Trump’s announcement of talks with Iran. Iranian officials publicly denied that they are negotiating with the Trump administration, and Iran’s top lawmaker accused the US president of peddling “fake news” in an attempt to “manipulate the financial and oil markets.”
The suspiciously timed bets ahead of the US president’s post heightened concerns that Trump administration insiders are illegally trading on—and profiting massively from—nonpublic knowledge.
Responding to a report that $1.5 billion worth of S&P 500 futures was purchased just five minutes before Trump’s Monday announcement, US Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) asked: “Who was it? Trump? A family member? A White House staffer?”
“This is corruption,” the senator wrote. “Mind-blowing corruption.”
Last week, Murphy joined US Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) in unveiling legislation that would ban prediction markets on “government actions, terrorism, war, assassination, and events where an individual knows or controls the outcome.”
The bill came on the heels of suspiciously timed, highly profitable bets related to US military actions in Venezuela and Iran.
The Guardian reported Monday that several newly created accounts on the online prediction platform Polymarket “laid bets on a US-Iran ceasefire over the weekend that appeared to show signs of insider knowledge, according to experts.”
Researcher Ben Yorke told the newspaper that the accounts—which are anonymous—“definitely” look like “someone with some degree of inside info.”
The Guardian noted that “online crypto watchers and experts suggested that the bets bore the signs of insider trading—both because they bought their positions at market price, and because some of the accounts looked like they could belong to a single investor attempting to conceal their identity by splitting their bet between multiple wallets.”
According to Yorke, “Typically, when you see wallet-splitting and deliberate attempts to obfuscate identity, it’s one of two scenarios: either a very large investor trying to shield their position from market impact, or insider trading.”
The Trump White House insisted Monday that any suggestion of insider trading “is baseless and irresponsible reporting.”
“The White House does not tolerate any administration official illegally profiteering off of insider knowledge,” said White House spokesperson Kush Desai.
Donald Trump calls for help from NATO allies in securing the Straight of Hormuz despite saying only 9 days ago that they don’t need people to join wars after they’ve already won.Donald Trump warns against following the Onaquietday.org blog, says that he’s heard that she’s a which with a black cat and a dangerous kitchen.Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
US Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and President Donald Trump listen to Energy Secretary Chris Wright during an event on March 4, 2026. (Photo by Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)
“The fusion of war-making and market manipulation by top Trump officials isn’t entirely without precedent,” said one observer, “but the speed and brazenness does seem new.”
US Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former fracking executive, was accused on Tuesday of manipulating global markets after he posted a striking claim on social media: The American Navy, he wrote, had “successfully escorted an oil tanker through the Strait of Hormuz to ensure oil remains flowing.”
The post on X was deleted minutes later, after “oil prices slid at their steepest pace in years,” according to the Wall Street Journal. The White House press secretary later acknowledged publicly that Wright’s claim was false, and the Energy Department—which has been scrambling to quell mounting fears of a sustained increase in oil prices and broader supply chain chaos stemming from the US-Israeli assault on Iran—threw unnamed staff under the bus, saying they “incorrectly captioned” the post.
“So who just made $100 million dollars shorting oil for the 3 minutes that Chris Wright had that post up?” asked hedge fund manager Spencer Hakimian.
Anti-monopoly researcher Matt Stoller wrote in response to the post and its deletion that “the fusion of war-making and market manipulation by top Trump officials isn’t entirely without precedent, but the speed and brazenness does seem new.”
The debacle also notably drew a reaction from the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, who wrote on X that “US officials are posting fake news to manipulate markets.”
“It won’t protect them from inflationary tsunami they’ve imposed on Americans,” wrote Araghchi. “Markets are facing the biggest shortfall in HISTORY: bigger than the Arab Oil Embargo, Iran’s Islamic Revolution, and the Kuwait invasion COMBINED.”
The Strait of Hormuz has become a critical flashpoint of the US-Israeli war on Iran, whose military has threatened to attack vessels that attempt to pass through the route in retaliation for the deadly missile onslaught. An estimated 13 million barrels per day passed through the strait in 2025—roughly 31% of all seaborne crude flows.
“At the beginning of the war we announced, and we announce again, no vessel associated with aggressors against Iran has the right to pass through the Strait of Hormuz,” said the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. “If you have doubts, come closer and find out.”
Reutersreported Tuesday that, contrary to Wright’s deleted post, the US Navy has “refused near-daily requests from the shipping industry for military escorts through the Strait of Hormuz since the start of the war on Iran, saying the risk of attacks is too high for now.”
The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations center said early Wednesday that a cargo vessel in the strait was “hit by an unknown projectile,” causing a fire onboard and forcing crew members to evacuate.
The report came hours after the US militarysaid it “eliminated multiple Iranian naval vessels,” including “16 minelayers near the Strait of Hormuz.” The announcement followed, by less than two hours, a social media post from President Donald Trump declaring that “we have no reports” of Iran laying mines in the strait.
“If for any reason mines were placed, and they are not removed forthwith, the Military consequences to Iran will be at a level never seen before,” Trump wrote. “If, on the other hand, they remove what may have been placed, it will be a giant step in the right direction!”
After attending a classified briefing on Tuesday, US Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) wrote that it was obvious the administration “had no plan” regarding the Strait of Hormuz prior to launching its assault on Iran.
“They don’t know how to get it safely back open,” Murphy wrote. “Which is unforgivable, because this part of the disaster was 100% foreseeable.”
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Finally, Feinstein finished with a rallying cry to voters and activists across the country:
And I think that’s what we need to do. We need to realise that one of the things that the sort of late era neoliberal capitalism does is it intentionally stifles our imaginations and our creativity to make us believe there is no alternative. As Margaret Thatcher famously and evilly said, to believe that this is the only way the world can be organised. And it’s not. We have the agency to decide how our world should be organised and we need to take that agency.
Referring to his upcoming book set for release in Autumn this year, he added:
And this book [Making a Killing] is an attempt to give people the information and to propose some of the ways in which we can take agency about something that is destroying our societies and our politics. And I’m always reminded when people feel very depressed and defeated, which of course I sometimes do too, I’m always reminded of what Nelson Mandela said when he was asked how he retained hope in an apartheid prison and in very dark and depressing days.
And he [Mandela] said, because anything is always impossible only until it’s done.
And I think we have the ability, we have the brains amongst us ordinary people to change the world profoundly and fundamentally. And I hope that this book will be a very small contribution towards that.
Rory Stewart and his neoliberal ilk can consider themselves ‘told’ after this brilliant takedown from a man who makes fighting corruption his day job.
President Donald Trump and Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, UAE Vice President and Deputy Prime Minister, shake hands on October 13, 2025 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. (Photo by Suzanne Plunkett, Pool / Getty Images)
According to the Journal’s sources, lieutenants of Abu Dhabi royal Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan signed a deal in early 2025 to buy a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial, the startup founded by members of the Trump family and the family of Trump Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff.
Documents reviewed by the Journal showed that the buyers in the deal agreed to “pay half up front, steering $187 million to Trump family entities,” while “at least $31 million was also slated to flow to entities affiliated with” the Witkoff family.
Weeks after green lighting the investment into the Trump crypto venture, Tahnoon met directly with President Donald Trump and Witkoff in the White House, where he reportedly expressed interest in working with the US on AI-related technology.
Two months after this, the Journal noted, “the administration committed to give the tiny Gulf monarchy access to around 500,000 of the most advanced AI chips a year—enough to build one of the world’s biggest AI data center clusters.”
Tahnoon in the past had tried to get US officials to give the UAE access to the chips, but was rebuffed on concerns that the cutting-edge technology could be passed along to top US geopolitical rival China, wrote the Journal.
Many observers expressed shock at the Journal’s report, with some critics saying that it showed Trump and his associates were engaging in a criminal bribery scheme.
“This was a bribe,” wrote Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, in a social media post. “UAE royals gave the Trump family $500 million, and Trump, in his presidential capacity, gave them access to tightly guarded American AI chips. The most powerful person on the planet, also happens to be the most shamelessly corrupt.”
Jesse Eisinger, reporter and editor at ProPublica, argued that the Abu Dhabi investment into the Trump cypto firm “should rank among the greatest US scandals ever.”
Democratic strategist David Axelrod also said that the scope of the Trump crypto investment scandal was historic in nature.
“In any other time or presidency, this story… would be an earthquake of a scandal,” he wrote. “The size, scope and implications of it are unprecedented and mind-boggling.”
Tommy Vietor, co-host of “Pod Save America,” struggled to wrap his head around the scale of corruption on display.
“How do you add up the cost of corruption this massive?” he wondered. “It’s not just that Trump is selling advanced AI tech to the highest bidder, national security be damned. Its that he’s tapped that doofus Steve Witkoff as an international emissary so his son Zach Witkoff can mop up bribes.”
Former Rep. Tom Malinkowski (D-NJ) warned the Trump and his associates that they could wind up paying a severe price for their deal with the UAE.
“If a future administration finds that such payments to the Trump family were acts of corruption,” he wrote, “these people could be sanctioned under the Global Magnitsky Act, and the assets in the US could potentially be frozen.”
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.
A general view of staff on a NHS hospital ward at Ealing Hospital in London
