https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jun/12/rishi-sunaks-closest-aide-placed-bet-on-election-date-days-before-announcement
Exclusive: £100 bet placed in Montgomeryshire – the constituency of Craig Williams – over July poll
How do you decide it's a good idea to risk getting a criminal record for fraud in the hopes of winning just one day's salary!?
That's the really stupid part of all this.
Small amount of money massive personal and political consequences. Hilariously stupid.
I think it just highlights loose morales for a quick quid. Defrauding a bookmaker with inside knowledge is still fraud.
I regularly had inside information on the winners of certain television “reality” tv shows, and could easily chuck £25 on the winner, knowing that it was easy money… but my own moral compass stopped me from doing it because I thought it was wrong.
I’m not saying that I’m better or worse than anyone, and I can see that the only company I would be defrauding would be a bookmaker… but I saw fraud as fraud, which still didn’t sit right with me.
Did I miss the part where the bet was something oddly specific where the aide could actually significantly impact akin to shaving points, or throwing a fight...?
Because it just says he bet on the general election, which honestly feels relatively harmless in the context of a society with widespread legalized gambling.
Not that I'd shed any tears over a Sunak aide getting fucked by any legal process, including a dubious one.
Can someone tell me if I'm missed something here?
He bet on the date of the election. It's not that he could impact the date (probably) but that he knew the announcement would happen a couple of days later. So less akin to throwing a fight and more having insider information about who was going to win. To me it seems similar (tho less financially rewarding) to buying stock in a company when your role in government means you know the value is going to increase soon when a new policy is introduced.
Actually....that makes a lot more sense and I don't recall that being brought up in article, but maybe I missed it.
I would say that elections are public affairs, and have widespread coverage, including public polling data, but I can see the analogy to insider trading.
Even if the only one's hurt here are the bookies, it's probably not an activity that should be publicly accepted as normal.
Yeah, to be fair the article's not very clear.
I would say that elections are public affairs, and have widespread coverage, including public polling data, but I can see the analogy to insider trading.
To be even clearer, he didn't bet on the outcome of the election, just that it would take place in July. Legally Sunak has to call an election before January 2025 but there has been a lot of speculation for the last six months about when it's going to happen. A lot of people assumed we wouldn't have an election until the autumn so Sunak's announcement a few weeks ago came as a big surprise.
He's an aide directly to Sunak, and placed the bet three days before the election was announced. The implication is that the aide knew the election had been scheduled for July, and thus placed a bet on it knowing 100% that he would win. The nearest equivalent would be if the aide was an assistant to a boxer who told him he was going to throw the fight: he may not be the actual person who threw the fight, but he knew what was going to happen and used that inside information to win a bet.
At minimum, he's defrauded Ladbrokes, who likely have it in their terms & conditions that you can't place bets with them based on inside information, which will include not only sportspeople betting on themselves, but on people working for and otherwise connected to the person/team/party/etc they're betting on. The fact that Ladbrokes referred it to the Gambling Commission for an investigation suggests the matter may be more serious than that, otherwise they'd have simply refused to pay out and left it at that. I'm not 100% sure, but I strongly suspect that what he did may actually have been illegal, and not merely a violation of Ladbrokes' terms and conditions. Gambling is legalised in the UK, but it's pretty heavily regulated (though still not as much as it should be), and I would actually be more surprised if insider bets like this weren't illegal. Bookies don't like being defrauded by customers using information that isn't publically available.
The thing that really stands out to me is that the sum of money was so small for someone in the aide's position. Craig Williams is an aide, but he's also an MP on a salary of £90k+. This was such a stupid risk to take for £500.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Rishi Sunak’s closest parliamentary aide placed a £100 bet on a July election just three days before the prime minister named the date, the Guardian can reveal.
The Gambling Commission is understood to have launched an inquiry after Craig Williams, the prime minister’s parliamentary private secretary, who became an MP in 2019, placed a bet with the bookmaker Ladbrokes on Sunday 19 May in his local constituency of Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr.
It is understood that a red flag was automatically raised by Ladbrokes as the bet in Williams’ name was potentially placed by a “politically exposed person”, and the bookmaker is particularly cautious over “novelty” markets.
The £100 bet, which could have led to a £500 payout on odds of 5/1, is believed to have been placed via an online account that would have required the user to provide personal details including their date of birth and debit card.
The prime minister is said to have opted for a pre-summer election in April, when it became clear that growth figures were going to show inflation falling and an economy returning to better health.
Oliver Dowden, the deputy prime minister; Liam Booth-Smith, Sunak’s chief of staff; and James Forsyth, his political secretary, were at the heart of the deliberations.
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