Better not tell Ed Miliband, but in spring 2022 his then shadow cabinet colleague, David Lammy, appears to have struck oil.

For the first time, The Spectator can tell the story of how, while serving as Britain’s shadow foreign secretary, Lammy was announced as the director of another country’s sovereign wealth fund – set up to (theoretically) channel newfound oil riches to its people, with a bit left over for the board.

This was announced on 20 April 2022 in an official press release from the President of Guyana’s office about the Natural Resource Fund (NRF). The statement is still on the government website. Three months later, in July 2022, President Irfaan Ali was telling international investors ‘we have David Lammy’, whose directorship he described as a key safeguard against the fund being misused.

Even without conflicts of interest, anyone with any awareness should have known to stay clear

Lammy admits discussing the job, but says he never actually signed up for it, nor was he paid. His spokesman told The Spectator: ‘David Lammy was approached in 2022 about a possible role [with the NRF], but he did not accept it, did not carry out any work, and received no payment or benefit of any kind.’ Asked how long Lammy had considered accepting the role, or whether he had immediately rejected it, the spokesman refused to answer.

His spokesman also refused to respond when asked how the government of Guyana could have announced his appointment without his agreement; or how, if so, he could have failed to notice or correct the announcement for more than three months.

Lammy’s relationship with the NRF, revealed in the press release, is just one intriguing aspect of the Deputy Prime Minister’s association with the South American country. The story starts in 2015, when Exxon-Mobil discovered vast reserves of light, sweet crude oil off Guyana’s coast: enough to now make this nation of 800,000 people the world’s fastest-growing economy, with a GDP per head greater than several EU states.

You’d never know it from the country’s slums, to which almost none of the new wealth has trickled down. According to the Inter-American Development Bank, 58 per cent of Guyana’s people live in poverty (on less than £5 per day) and 32 per cent in extreme poverty (on less than £2.70 per day).

The NRF was meant to have changed all that. Lammy was one of the people who suggested setting it up. In 2018, in a video seen by The Spectator, Lammy told an event at the Guyana High Commission in London: ‘We need a sovereign wealth fund that is independent of government, that is properly managed […] and that is something that I’m urging the [Guyanese] government to be engaged in.’

Lammy has often used the word ‘we’ to describe Guyana. (‘We are preserving our rainforest,’ he said in the talk. ‘We are not cutting our rainforests down, like the Brazilians.’) Born in Britain to Guyanese parents, he holds joint citizenship of both countries. But though Lammy was a serving British MP at the time, he did not always use the same pronoun for Britain, referring to it as ‘you’.

As he put it, laughingly, in the same talk: ‘The Commonwealth today is a different place. It’s a different India, it’s a different Nigeria, and indeed it will be a different Guyana. A Guyana with oil. When your oil reserves are drying up in Scotland, so there!’

He added: ‘One of the reasons I go back [to Guyana] so regularly is because I know the political class in the country […] I’ve always stayed separate from some of the local party politics. I know all of the politicians.’ Asked ‘Do they seek your advice?’, he replied: ‘It’s a mutual, friendly dialogue that I am able to have with both the President and his ministers but also with the leader of the opposition and his team as well.’

By April 2022, these discussions appeared to have borne fruit, with the government announcement of Lammy’s new job. That month, five months after opening, the NRF had US $741 million (£500 million) in the bank; it is now worth around $3.25 billion.

According to the act of parliament setting up the NRF, the directorships are paid, though amounts seem never to have been disclosed. The reporting of Lammy’s appointment was controversial locally. Policy Forum Guyana, an NGO, said: ‘Guyanese will be taken aback, justifiably, that no explanation has been provided for [the] inclusion of UK citizen David Lammy MP.’ As they pointed out, Lammy ‘is shadow foreign secretary in the UK parliament who by virtue of his oath of office is committed to be loyal to the Queen and her successors’.

It’s not clear whether Lammy ever told anyone in Britain, or the Labour party, about any of this. Only at the end of August 2022, more than four months after Lammy’s appointment had been announced, did President Ali declare that ‘due to changes in his requirement at home in the UK’, Lammy ‘asked us not to have him play a part on the board at this time’.

The NRF was not Lammy’s only involvement in Guyana. Until September 2024, two months after becoming foreign secretary, he held share options in and was an ‘unpaid adviser’ to Pomeroon Trading, which is developing a coconut plantation and selling carbon tax credits. Its co-founder is the UK-based mining and oil financier Neil Passmore, and its website states that it has a partnership with the UK government. In 2019, Lammy promoted the company’s proposed public share offer on the Guyana stock exchange, saying: ‘I hope Pomeroon’s IPO will excite all my fellow Guyanese people as much as it excites me.’

Even without the potential conflicts of interest and loyalties, anyone with any awareness of petro-state politics should have known to stay clear. Guyana’s profit–sharing agreement with the oil companies is described by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis as ‘one–sided’ and a ‘bad deal’, with the NRF receiving less than 15 per cent of revenues.

And though the money has bought some conspicuous public works – a new bridge, hospitals, roads – a member of the NRF’s investment committee, Terrence Campbell, an opposition MP, has filed a lawsuit alleging that its cash is being siphoned off in opaque ways to fund day-to-day government spending and is likely to be ‘diverted for political purposes’. A few months before facing re-election last year, President Ali gave every adult citizen a cash gift of 100,000 Guyanese dollars (£350), a kindly gesture he promises to repeat this year.

Lammy’s involvement with Guyanese Big Oil may not, in the end, have profited him. But it must raise serious questions about his judgment.