Cash for questions

The "cash-for-questions affair" was a political scandal of the 1990s in the United Kingdom.

It began in October 1994 when The Guardian newspaper alleged that London's most successful parliamentary lobbyist,Ian Greer of Ian Greer Associates, had bribed two Conservative Members of Parliament in exchange for asking parliamentary questions, and other tasks, on behalf of the Egyptian owner of Harrods department store, Mohamed Al-Fayed.

The Guardian's report alleged that Al-Fayed had approached the paper and accused Ian Greer of paying then-MPs Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith to table parliamentary questions on his behalf at £2,000 a time. Smith resigned immediately after admitting to accepting payments from Al-Fayed himself, but not from Greer as The Guardian had alleged.

Hamilton and Greer immediately issued libel writs in the High Court against The Guardian to clear their names.

The furore prompted the then-prime minister John Major to instigate the Nolan Committee, to review the issue of standards in public life.

Six weeks later in December 1994, in a private letter to the chairman of the parliamentary watchdog the Members' Interests Committee, Mohamed Al-Fayed alleged that he had paid Hamilton, in addition to the original allegations that Ian Greer was the paymaster. Hamilton denied this new allegation.

The Defamation Bill 1996 was designed to alter the Bill of Rights 1689 and allows an MP to waive parliamentary privilege. This would allow Mr Hamilton to give evidence in court on statements he made in Commons.

Two years later, at the end of September 1996, three days before Hamilton's and Greer's libel actions were due to start, three of Mohamed Al-Fayed's employees claimed that they had processed cash payments to the two men. Hamilton and Greer denied these new allegations.

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Wikipedia