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The U.K. was about to host the U.N.’s COP26 climate conference in Glasgow the following year and the project “became a totemic battle between those in government who wanted to proceed and those who didn’t,” the former senior official said.
On one side were Cabinet ministers who argued “‘the U.K. is a country committed to COP, to battling climate change, and it’s therefore not appropriate [that] taxpayers money be spent in this way,'” the official explained. “The other camp was saying, ‘no, no, [UK Export Finance] should be able to finance whatever it likes … lots of other countries are proceeding with this.'”
Truss “was very keen for this to go ahead,” the former official said. At the time, the trade secretary argued the U.K. “would be missing opportunities,” they said, if it didn’t back the project and that China would back it if Britain didn’t. “Liz was like: ‘no, no, we do this.’”
Truss declined to comment for this article.
‘A reputational risk to the UK’
On June 10, 2020, Truss, with then-Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s approval, signed off the $1.15 billion in funding for the TotalEnergies LNG project.
The support, which has not yet been drawn down, would be delivered by UK Export Finance, which underwrites loans from banks to U.K. firms working on the project and in some cases has also offered its own direct financing to those firms.