The financier Lex Greensill has told a court that senior managers at SoftBank “felt threatened” by his relationship with Masayoshi Son, the founder of the Japanese tech investor that pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into his specialist lender before its collapse.
Greensill said he travelled to Tokyo “often weekly” for in-person mentoring sessions with the billionaire founder, whom he dined with and referred to by the Japanese honorific “Son-san”.
Greensill made the comments in his first public courtroom appearance since the devastating demise in 2021 of his company, which counted the former prime minister David Cameron as an adviser.
Greensill said there were “people in the SoftBank organisation who felt threatened by the nature of the relationship”, and sought to “make things difficult” for him.
The Australian, who appeared in court in a dark blue suit and with a trimly cut beard on Monday, said that included some senior SoftBank executives.
The businessman is appearing for two days of a month-long trial at the high court in London, in which a former Credit Suisse fund is suing SoftBank for $440m (£325m) over a complex deal it allegedly coordinated with Greensill Capital prior to its collapse.
It is part of efforts by the Swiss bank UBS to recoup money for former clients of its former rival Credit Suisse, which it acquired in an emergency rescue deal in 2023.
The case centres on funds that Greensill lent to Katerra, a US construction group that SoftBank had also invested in. Credit Suisse is alleging that SoftBank coordinated a restructuring plan for Katerra with Greensill in late 2020, in a move that benefited SoftBank and left the Swiss lender’s clients out of pocket.
SoftBank has denied the claims. Its lawyers told the court that it was a “classic example of claimants casting around for a party with deep pockets on whom they seek to pin blame for a loss caused by their own negligence and risk-taking. It should be dismissed.”
UBS said in a statement: “We will continue to pursue all paths to maximise financial recovery of the supply chain finance funds, acting in the interests of all our stakeholders.”
Greensill’s comments come four years after his eponymous supply chain lender collapsed and became engulfed in a string of financial and political scandals.
He told the court that 29 December 2020 was “one of the least pleasant days of my life” despite being his birthday – as it started to become clear that SoftBank was not going to provide $1.5bn worth of bridging loans for Greensill’s parent company, which collapsed three months later.
The 48-year-old Australian melon farmer turned City banker founded the lender in 2011, offering companies advances on their invoices in exchange for a fee.
He would go on to gain high-level political connections, and hired some of the world’s most powerful former politicians including Cameron and the former Australian foreign minister Julie Bishop.
However, the company, which at one point hoped to launch a £22bn stock market flotation, collapsed in March 2021, after insurers refused to renew contracts that underpinned billions of pounds worth of loans and kept Greensill’s complex financial operation afloat.
It came amid growing concerns over the firm’s management and billions of pounds of risky loans issued to companies owned by the metals magnate Sanjeev Gupta.
Attention then turned to its government connections, including Cameron’s efforts to persuade ministers to give Greensill access to government-backed Covid loans, resulting in a lobbying scandal that engulfed Whitehall for months.
Greensill’s failure had far-reaching financial consequences, including for Credit Suisse, which packaged up Greensill’s loans into investment funds for wealthy clients.
Credit Suisse was forced to suspend $10bn worth of those funds after Greensill Capital went under. It left customers nursing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of losses, and further eroded investor confidence in the 167-year-old bank, which collapsed two years later.
Son, who Forbes estimates to be worth $29bn, built SoftBank into one of the world’s most prominent investors, making bets on tech and online services including China’s e-commerce site Alibaba, the TikTok parent ByteDance, and the UK chip designer Arm.
He used his investment gains to make a series of increasingly bold bets on tech companies, and obtained Saudi Arabia’s backing for its tech-focused SoftBank Vision Funds.
During the Covid pandemic tech boom, the valuations of its companies soared but after the bubble burst, SoftBank went through a period of retrenchment, although Son has continued to forge ahead with investments.
The trial, which began last Thursday, is due to continue until 4 July.
