City grandee Victor Blank gave Rachel Reeves £175k donations

Scrutiny: Chancellor Rachel Reeves

Rachel Reeves has received £175,000 in donations from City grandee Sir Victor Blank, a former chairman of TSB.

Sir Victor was at the helm when Lloyds was strong-armed by the last Labour government into rescuing Halifax Bank of Scotland during the financial crisis.

A long-time Labour supporter, he gave the money to her Westminster office between 2021 and 2023 when Reeves was Shadow Chancellor.

The news comes as questions continue to swirl about her role at HBoS when it was taken over by Lloyds in a £20 billion taxpayer-funded bailout in 2008.

Reeves initially said she worked as an economist at HBoS before entering politics. But her profile on the LinkedIn social networking site has been changed to say her job was in retail banking.

The update has sparked criticism that she tried to overplay her role at a lender that almost collapsed during her time there.

Reeves also worked as an economist at the Bank of England for six years before joining HBoS in 2006. She had previously claimed she spent ‘a decade’ at the Bank.

Conservative MP Richard Holden has written to Reeves asking for more clarity about her employment history. ‘The allegations that your CV might not be accurate are incredibly serious and would raise significant concerns about your ability to be honest with the British public, concerns which your Budget has already raised,’ he wrote.

Reeves has come under fire for her tax-and-spend Budget that included a £25 billion hike in employers’ National Insurance payments that was not in the Labour manifesto.

She is understood to have first met Sir Victor after she left HBoS and became an MP in 2010.

He stopped donating to Labour five years later, but resumed donations after Reeves became Shadow Chancellor in 2021.

She is the only MP to have received his largesse since then. As the chairman of Lloyds TSB, Sir Victor was collared by Prime Minister Gordon Brown at a reception in 2008 and encouraged to buy HBoS, which had been brought down by loose lending, poor risk controls and a lack of liquidity.

Sir Victor, who is also a former chairman of media group Trinity Mirror, left Lloyds TSB the following year after the shotgun marriage was completed.

A Treasury source said Reeves ‘worked in retail banking covering various areas drawing on her background as an economist’.

A Labour Party spokesman said: ‘All donations have been declared in accordance with the rules in the usual way.’

Sir Victor was contacted for comment.