A high-profile UK Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) has resigned from two blockchain-related positions after media investigations into an allegedly undisclosed pay deal for his advisory role in a blockchain[1] startup, FT Alphaville reported[2] yesterday, August 1.
Grant Shapps, the former chair of the Conservative party until his resignation in the throes of a 2015 bullying scandal, tendered a dual resignation this week from his roles as chair of governance for the blockchain property portal OpenBrix, as well as from his co-chairmanship of the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Blockchain.
Shapps had established the Blockchain APPG together with another Tory MP last year, FT Alphaville reports.
The MP’s move came after FT Alphaville discovered that he was due to receive potentially “hundred of thousands of pounds” worth of digital tokens ahead of OpenBrix’s public Initial Coin Offering (ICO[3]) launch, having listed his involvement as an “unpaid” role in the parliamentary register[4] of members' financial interests.
FT’s conversation with co-founder and CEO of OpenBrix, Shahad Choudhury, revealed that Shapps had been hired under a consultancy contract with the startup and was entitled to a “roughly comparable” token allocation as that of the OpenBrix co-founders –– 8 million BRIX tokens. Each BRIX token is reportedly worth 0.001 Ethereum (ETH), resulting in a shared pool of around £2.8million ($3.7 million) at current rates[5].
Shahad Choudhury is himself reportedly a full-time civil servant at the UK’s export credit agency and was a keynote speaker at the inaugural Blockchain APPG meeting.
FT’s coverage of the case highlights a dubious “intersection of business and politics” in the UK parliament, noting that the Blockchain APPG had enlisted
