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Shapps Admits He Had Second Job As 'millionaire Web Marketer' While Mp


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http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/mar/15/grant-shapps-admits-he-had-second-job-as-millioniare-web-marketer-while-mp

Former Tory housing minister

Grant Shapps, the Tory party chairman, had a second job as a “multimillion-dollar web marketer” under the pseudonym Michael Green for at least year after he first became an MP.

It is a suggestion that Shapps has repeatedly denied for three years, but the Guardian has discovered a recording from the summer of 2006 in which the Conservative MP for Welwyn Hatfield boasts his products could make listeners a “ton of cash by Christmas”.

Rather than running down his operations it appears that in 2006 Shapps was expanding the company. On a recording made in the summer of that year, the Tory MP says over the next few months he will be running his “mentoring programme” to hire 10 staff, produce software to create websites that “Google prefers” and start selling “Stinking Rich 3” the latest tome in a range of self-help guides that claimed to make customers wealthy and which “sell fantastically well”.

Posing as Green, Shapps tells fellow web entrepreneur Peter Twist that “[stinking Rich] is not a cheap product, but it’s a great internet marketing product”. At no point in the 40-minute sales pitch does Shapps reveal his true identity.

His entry in the parliamentary register of members’ interest for 2005 and 2006 lists his directorships and shareholdings in a printing firm and How To Corp, the “marketing” company then fronted by Michael Green.

But since 2012 when pictures emerged of Shapps in 2004 at a $3,000-a-head US internet conference where he was photographed wearing a badge describing himself as “Michael Green” the MP consistently defended himself saying he had stopped being Green after he took his seat in the Commons.

When confronted with the audio, which shows he was still operating as Green over a year after the 2005 general election, a Tory party spokesman said that Shapps now conceded “his writing career [as Green]... ended shortly after [becoming an MP].”

Prior to this concession Shapps had gone to extraordinary lengths to insist he had never been Michael Green after being elected in May 2005.

Last November the Tory party chairman used legal threats to force a local constituent and ex-Labour councillor to delete an allegedly libellous post on a Facebook group about his use of the pseudonym and replace it with an apology that explicitly states that he was not using the Michael Green pseudonym when he was an MP.

In papers seen by the Guardian, Shapp’s lawyers wrote to the constituent noting “your agreement to post an apology requires you (to) make a ‘new’ post (ie a post on the ‘homepage’ of the group, and not a comment on another post)”.

The lawyers state that the Tory chairman requires the apology to read: “Mr Shapps MP has at no time misled over the use of a pen name. Indeed, I now understand that he openly published his full name alongside business publications making it clear that he used a pen name merely to separate business and politics, prior to entering parliament.”

Although How To Corp was registered to an office in Pinner, north-west London, its products and services were priced in US dollars, and in its product materials How To Corp said it had an office the United States and listed US phone and fax numbers. There was no record of the company when the Guardian checked with the US state authorities.

None of the webpages, ebooks, newsletters or audio recordings collected by the Guardian state that Shapps is Michael Green.

He is not mentioned in How To Write a Newsletter, where in 2003 Green’s company says it was about to float on the stock exchange with a valuation of $28m (£19m). In fact the company had been started by Shapps in 2000 and it was only registered at Companies House in 2005. The Tory MP transferred his share in the firm to his wife in 2008.

How To Corp was dissolved last year after it marketed “scraping” software TrafficPaymaster – the sale of which, the police said, may have been an “offence of fraud”. How to Corp’s websites have now disappeared from the internet and TrafficPaymaster, which claimed to produce web pages by “spinning and scraping” content and sought to attract advertising in contravention of Google’s code of conduct, is no longer on sale.

While traces of How to Corp were vanishing, Shapps continued insisting he did not use the name Michael Green while an MP. In September 2012 he told Sky’s Dermot Murnaghan that “before I went in to parliament I used to write business publications and, like many authors, write under a business name”.

Edited by R K
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HOLA442

The thing that really concerns m,e about this is that one of our major political parties thinks that it is appropriate to have someone with this CV within a million miles of the cabinet.

Anyone selling a get rich quick scheme has to face an obvious question,,,,if your plan is so good why are you trying to sell it to me rather than than just follow it yourself and make yourself rich that way? In business it seems "those that can, do. Those that can't write internet get rich quick schemes."

Surely "the Party of Business" can come up with someone with a better track record than this?

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Unfortunately I think he came to prominence in the Party due to his 'real world' experience of business and his 'expertise' of modern web based marketing methods that could be deployed to boost the Tory's electoral chances.

It seems an ideal CV seen that way. Business in modern Britain today where all the ads are for gambling/speculation/get rich quick, and missellling a Party to the electorate.

Shapps/Green is an indication of how the "professionalisation" of politics has resulted in the current malaise of mediocrity across all the major parties.

20 years ago we had Michael Hesletine - who like him or not, had built Haymarket Publishing up from nothing into a publishing powerhouse. Now we get Grant Shapps.

If you've spent 30 years building a successful business, or building a successful career, you just won't have been able to put in the required levels of sucking up and sycophancy to be in the cabinet in your early 50's - when you are probably at your absolute best in terms of your abilities as a leader with 30+ years of real world experience.

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Not difficult.... Look at an individual, how they speak, the actions they take, make your own judgements.....is it someone you would look up to,trust or follow.....everything always comes out eventually only a matter of time, can see right through it, they call it transparency.

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His product is remarkably similiar to those found and promoted on the very grey area Warrior forums.

http://www.warriorforum.com/

Which is simply an advice conduit explaining how to relieve not so clever people of their hard earned cash.

This bloke is little more than a clever talking wide boy confidence trickster.

This sort of stuff is one step up from a spam emailing technique...

Edited by geezer466
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Yes, agreed. This is bottom feeder stuff. It's a bit like comparing someone who ran a car boot stall with the CEO of a massive retail business. Sure they are both retail entrepreneurs - but one is perhaps more likely to be Party Chairman material than the other.

My guess is that the Tories had no idea what they were buying with Shapps - just that he ticked the digital and social media boxes. They probably thought they were getting the British equivalent of someone who created Facebook. Perhaps they are...

Edited by StainlessSteelCat
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I loathe Grant Schapps. After Help to Buy was first introduced I emailed my MP, Zac Goldsmith, to say I was very concerned that it would merely help to push up prices that were sky high already.

ZG said he 'shared some of my concerns' and forwarded my email to GS. I had such an arrogant and dismissive reply, saying there was nothing to suggest that it would push prices up.

He has that wide-boy, spivvy look, too.

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I loathe Grant Schapps. After Help to Buy was first introduced I emailed my MP, Zac Goldsmith, to say I was very concerned that it would merely help to push up prices that were sky high already.

ZG said he 'shared some of my concerns' and forwarded my email to GS. I had such an arrogant and dismissive reply, saying there was nothing to suggest that it would push prices up.

He has that wide-boy, spivvy look, too.

Arrogant, dismissive, and with hindsight, wrong.

I loathe him too, "wide-boy spiv" pretty much sums him up.

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I loathe Grant Schapps. After Help to Buy was first introduced I emailed my MP, Zac Goldsmith, to say I was very concerned that it would merely help to push up prices that were sky high already.

ZG said he 'shared some of my concerns' and forwarded my email to GS. I had such an arrogant and dismissive reply, saying there was nothing to suggest that it would push prices up.

He has that wide-boy, spivvy look, too.

Have you gone back to him and told him you were right anf why someone who clearly can't see past the end of their nose thinks they should be emplyed by the public ?

Maybe send it to a local/national news paper too.

We really do need a change of governance in the UK. The current system to too prone to corruption.

I ask though, who do we vote for to effect any change ?

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