FT ran a really good article yesterday on Leadsom's massaged CV.
As it's subscription only, I have C&P'd the article below (which I'm not strictly supposed to do).
Andrea Leadsom has published a revised CV after claims that she exaggerated her roles in a City of London career that supporters describe as “stellar”.
The Conservative leadership candidate has often referred to her 25 years of experience in finance, recounting how she spent the weekend with Eddie George, the late governor of the Bank of England, calming the fears of bankers after Barings collapsed.
She told the BBC last weekend that she had “run enormous teams, small teams, start-up businesses”. But former colleagues at Barclays and Invesco Perpetual have claimed that Mrs Leadsom has overblown the importance of her roles at both institutions.
The CV published by her staff on Wednesday changed some details from earlier versions — downgrading the seniority of one role — and contained an inaccuracy that her spokesman could not explain.
Her level of experience in banking and fund management has become a key issue for her campaign, especially after she came second behind Theresa May in the first round of voting by Conservative MPs to choose their next leader and prime minister.
Having previously said she worked as “financial institutions director” at Barclays in her Who’s Who entry and in an article she wrote for the FT, Ms Leadsom’s new CV now lists her role as “deputy financial institutions director, managing global banking network”.
Mrs Leadsom’s spokesman said the confusion arose because she had held two “contemporaneous roles”, one as deputy director of financial institutions and the other as “project director, preparing bank for the euro”.
In her maiden speech to parliament in 2010 she said: “Eddie George, the then governor of the Bank of England, called together a small group of bankers, including myself, and we worked over the weekend to calm the fears of banks that were exposed to Barings.”
But several former Barclays executives who were in senior positions when Mrs Leadsom was working at the bank say they do not remember her — despite her recent claim to have been the bank’s youngest ever director. One said: “I think some of the claims about her seniority are somewhat fanciful.”
But her supporters complain that Mrs Leadsom is the victim of a smear campaign. Penny Mordaunt, a Conservative MP and ally of Mrs Leadsom in the victorious Leave campaign, said: “This is a concerted effort to rubbish a stellar career and imply that she was just making the tea.”
At Barclays “she was running a fund, she was also managing the global banking network”, Ms Mordaunt told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “Andrea’s stock is high in this area.”
One indication of the relatively junior level of her financial sector jobs is that Mrs Leadsom is listed in the financial services register under her maiden name of Salmon for only a three-month period during her time at Invesco.
Her new CV also says she worked as “managing director” at De Putron Fund Management, the hedge fund run by her brother-in-law Peter de Putron, after she left Barclays in 1997. But the annual return for the company filed at Companies House in 1999 lists her title as “marketing director” — seemingly a more junior role.
“You have to be very careful with job titles that make people look very important — titles like ‘managing director’, ‘head of’, ‘chief of’,” said Nick Hedley, a founder of Hedley May, which recruits for jobs across the City. “They can hide somewhat what the real role is. I think in general there is a lot of grade inflation of titles that goes on in the relatively flat structure of financial services.”
Mrs Leadsom’s time at Invesco is also in dispute. A former member of the executive committee at Invesco Perpetual from 1996-2003 said: “Andrea who? She had no involvement in fund management, she had no presence whatsoever in the organisation. I would speak to the fund managers on a daily basis. I never came across her. She’s been very naive on this.”
Robert Stephens, a former colleague of hers at Invesco, wrote on the Reactions website that claims about her financial sector experience “risk misleading people”.
“Last week, at my prompting, she corrected her CV with Wikipedia and Who’s Who, changing her title from the obviously incorrect chief investment officer to the titles of senior investment officer and head of corporate governance,” Mr Stephens wrote.
“Her actual job was to work (sometimes part-time) on ‘special projects’, mostly for the chief investment officer. These included, for example, negotiating pay terms for senior fund managers. Towards the end of her time, she advised on a couple of governance issues.”
“As I understand it she had no one reporting to her in either role, so the words senior and head are, one might say, superfluous,” he added.
Mrs Leadsom has lent heavily on her experience in the City when criticising senior bankers, including when she criticised Mark Carney, the Bank of England governor, for “going outside of his remit and giving a personal opinion” about the risks of Brexit.