Heavy Metal Sleaze

Once again we see a political party swayed by a donor. The pressure that Andrew Cook the chairman of the engineering firm William Cook Holdings placed on the Conservative business minister Mark Prisk in May to warn that an £80m state loan to Sheffield Forgemasters might be illegal under EU law. Andrew Cook – the Tories' largest donor in Yorkshire, who subsidised David Cameron's flights in opposition to the tune of £54,000. In an email to Prisk on 25 May, three weeks before the loan was cancelled, Cook, chairman of the engineering firm William Cook Holdings, said: "I stress that Sheffield Forgemasters is not a competitor of my business." But in a statement issued today in response to the release of his email, he admitted that he had tried to establish a direct link with the company. "It is no surprise that I am strongly opposed to the previous government's handout to Forgemasters, particularly when I had already offered as a local businessman to help supply the funding they needed," he said. "My only intention was to highlight the illegal use of taxpayers' money by the previous Labour government."

When will the political sleaze end!