On Thursday September 3rd it was reported that a Conservative peer had allegedly breached ministerial code with her family firm signing multimillion-pound deals to supply Uganda’s government with solar power equipment.
According to The Guardian, Baroness Sandip Verma’s company, had signed two deals worth over £88m after meetings with Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni.
61-year-old Lady Verma was made a life peer in 2006. She was a junior minister in the Department of Energy and Climate Change from 2012 to 2015, and then for International Development (DfID) from May 2015 to July 2016. Last year, she had stood up to contest for the Mayor of Leicester which has a sizeable population of Ugandan Asians.
Now, it has emerged that Baroness Verma had joined Nexus Green as chair and director without informing the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA), the paper reported.
She was apparently also present when the company signed an £8m deal to provide the Ugandan military with solar power, eight months after leaving her job as a junior development minister. In September 2019, reports indicate that the Ugandan government had also signed an agreement with the firm to build a factory to make solar equipment.
Government rules mandate transparency whereby, ministers are required to declare all roles and jobs they undertake for up to two years after leaving office.
Labour MP for Birmingham Edgbaston, Preet Kaur Gill has urged Boris Johnson to launch an independent inquiry. But Verma has insisted that she did not break the rules on declarations of interest because Nexus Green was an energy firm and not connected to her last role in DfID. In her statement to The Guardian, she said,
“If it relates to a ministerial position then you have got to declare it. I did not have to declare this because I had left energy many years earlier.”
Baroness Verma is reported to have met Ugandan government officials on at least one occasion while she was a minister in September 2015 in London, at a convention to discuss investment opportunities in sectors such as energy. The following month her son Rikki, as The Guardian reports, was appointed director of Nexus Green, a company based in a building in Leicester jointly owned by his parents.
The Ugandan parliament’s national economy committee has written that Nexus Green plans to establish a factory in Uganda to make solar-powered irrigation equipment and install the systems. Last September, the committee signed off a proposal to try to borrow up to £90m from UKEF for the development of solar-powered irrigation. It is understood that an application for a loan has been received but has not been approved.
