Article by Ethan Shone republished from OpenDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Government failed to declare meeting with top Global Counsel clients, and says no notes were taken at several meetings

The government has no official records of meetings that top civil servants held with senior figures and clients from Peter Mandelson’s lobbying firm last year, including an undeclared meeting with oil giants and private equity firms, openDemocracy can reveal.

Global Counsel went into administration earlier this year after details of Mandelson’s close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein were revealed in the Epstein Files, including emails showing how he sought the billionaire paedophile’s advice on establishing the firm.

But before its collapse, Global Counsel’s business was booming as it and its founder established close ties to Keir Starmer’s Labour Party. 

Ahead of the 2024 election, the company donated a member of staff to support Labour’s work on financial services policy development and produced promotional materials, which openDemocracy has seen, touting its significant access to the party. “Our clients’ engagement pays dividends in the long run,” it promised, adding that it was “uniquely placed” to help corporate clients “establish relationships that outlive the election and deliver policy dividends on the other side”.

By the end of that year, Starmer had appointed Mandelson as the UK’s US ambassador, and Global Counsel had seen its UK revenue surge by 75% since 2022, from £7.9m to £13.9m. The business also took on over 20 new clients in the first quarter after Labour’s win – more than in the previous five years combined – including Palantir, Shell and TikTok.

Now, openDemocracy can reveal that the most senior civil servant from the Department for Business and Trade and a senior Treasury official met with Global Counsel’s representatives several times last year, including at a roundtable the firm hosted for its clients.

No records from the discussions – including notes or minutes – exist, the government told openDemocracy in response to a Freedom of Information request.

Our investigation comes as parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee takes the rare step of voicing “grave concerns” about the government’s failure to keep proper records from official meetings, following its review of documents set to be published relating to Mandelson’s time as US ambassador.

ISC chair Lord Beamish wrote to the government expressing a number of concerns, including over a “lack of an audit trail – in terms of agendas, minutes and records of conversations,” which he described as “unacceptable in government.”

Shadowy meetings

In January last year, Gareth Davies, then permanent secretary at the Department for Business and Trade, met Global Counsel’s most senior adviser on business and trade, Geoffrey Norris, at the exclusive Royal Horseguards Hotel in Whitehall. 

The meeting was useful enough that four months later, in May 2025, the pair returned to the same hotel to chat some more. 

Yet little is known about what they discussed. The department quite vaguely recorded the purpose of these meetings as “to discuss latest business updates” and “discussion on growth”, respectively.

When openDemocracy asked for more information, the government said it had none.

Davies then spoke at a Global Counsel dinner event in early June and attended a client roundtable event that the firm hosted, which Norris chaired, at its offices weeks later. 

There, the senior civil servant spoke with executives from several Global Counsel clients, including oil giants Shell and Equinor, plus JP Morgan and Blackstone. But you wouldn’t know that from the government’s published transparency requests, which fail to mention that clients were present. Their attendance was revealed to openDemocracy only in documents obtained via Freedom of Information requests.

Norris was not the only Global Counsel member Davies was in touch with. In July last year, he met with Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, the company’s co-founder and CEO, “to discuss the industrial strategy”. 

Both Norris and Wegg-Prosser are New Labour alumni. Norris was a top business aide in Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s governments, and later advised Mandelson while he was business secretary, while Wegg-Prosser worked as an adviser to Mandelson before becoming Blair’s director of strategic communications. 

When Labour lost power at the 2010 election, Mandelson and Wegg-Prosser established Global Counsel, which Norris joined soon afterwards, remaining at the company until its collapse in February. 

Wegg-Prosser was reportedly offered a peerage and a role as Labour’s investment minister in September 2024, but declined to avoid stepping down as Global Counsel’s CEO. He eventually quit in February of this year after it was revealed that he’d had extensive contact with Jeffrey Epstein, including traveling to New York to meet Epstein in 2010, two years after Epstein was convicted for soliciting prostitution from a minor. Global Counsel went into administration weeks after Wegg-Prosser’s exit.

Davies is a long-serving civil servant who recently left DBT to become the top official at the Home Office. He began his career in government alongside Davies, Wegg Prosser and Mandelson, as a Downing Street adviser during the New Labour years. 

A DBT spokesperson said: “Transparency returns are published in line with Cabinet Office guidance, and the Civil Service Code has not been broken.”

‘We need full transparency’

Global Counsel also enjoyed significant access to the Treasury under Labour – in some cases with no record of what it lobbied ministers and officials about. 

A Global Counsel lobbyist specialising in financial services was seconded to the office of Labour’s first City minister, Tulip Siddiq, before she resigned in January 2025 over alleged corruption links to her aunt’s ousted government in Bangladesh. The staffer’s secondment was a registrable donation-in-kind valued at more than £35,000, and not against parliament’s rules.

In November 2024, Siddiq, who was also economic secretary to the Treasury, met with one of Global Counsel’s most senior figures, its financial services lead, Rebecca Park, to discuss “growth and competitiveness of the financial services sector”. The government declined to provide any details of what was discussed after openDemocracy submitted an FOI request last year.

Later, in July 2025, the Treasury’s director general of financial services, Gwyneth Nurse, met Global Counsel’s Benedict Brogan, a former journalist-turned banking lobbyist, at the Wolseley to “discuss the UK regulatory environment”. Again, the government told openDemocracy it held no further record of what was discussed at the meeting. 

Follow-up correspondence obtained by openDemocracy shows Brogan invited Nurse to a client roundtable event in the autumn, with the suggested date of 20 October. Government transparency data shows Nurse attended a Global Counsel dinner event on 20 October, though the records do not show which of the firm’s clients were in attendance. 

Financial deregulation has been a significant feature of Labour’s policy offering to the City, which has won the party rare public shows of support from some of the world’s most influential financiers, notably JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon and Jon Gray of Blackstone. Both firms have, incidentally, worked with Global Counsel. 

The lobbying firm was also reportedly contracted by other financial giants as part of an ultimately successful campaign against an increase in ‘carried interest,’ the reduced rate of tax that dealmakers pay on their profits from private equity deals, which can often save them millions.

Mick McAteer, a former regulator and the director of the Financial Inclusion and Markets Centre, said the finance sector should “serve the interests of the real economy, environment, and society”. 

“But, finance sector lobbyists now exercise undue influence over finance sector policy. As a result, we are seeing a programme of deregulation and corporate welfare designed to promote finance sector growth, which could ultimately harm our interests. We need full transparency on meetings between policymakers and finance lobbyists.”

The government has previously faced significant criticism over its failure to declare a meeting in early 2025 between Starmer, Mandelson and Palantir.

Now, its failure to keep records of the meetings it has had with Global Counsel and its clients appears to breach the Civil Service Code, under which all civil servants are legally required to “keep accurate official records”. 

Separate guidance on managing records in ministers’ private offices states explicitly that officials are “bound by the government’s commitment to keep records of meetings with outside interest groups”.

Duncan Hames, senior director of policy at Transparency UK, said: “When government transparency is treated as a tick-box exercise, or ignored altogether, this undermines our right to know how decisions are made and leaves room for undue influence. 

“In this case, as in so many others, it is clear that the current system is not working as it should. It’s time for the UK government to follow Scotland’s lead and publish a comprehensive register of those lobbying government.”

openDemocracy contacted Ben Wegg Prosser and Benedict Brogan but neither responded.

Article by Ethan Shone republished from OpenDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

dizzy: Busy this morning.