We now have a definite answer to the question raised in my previous post: is Johnny Mercer a non-executive director at Crucial Academy? Mercer was appointed as a director on 3 June 2019.
Curiously, this is nine months after he registered the £85,000 a year directorship with the Commons authorities, and a month after I queried why this directorship didn't appear in Companies House filings.
Companies House issued the following response when I went back to them after the appointment:
We can confirm the company has notified the registrar of Mr Mercer’s appointment as a director within 14 days of the date of his appointment, as the Law requires.
The company has made contact with us regarding this matter and confirmed the appointment of Mr Mercer has been registered with Companies House.
Our position regarding Mr Mercer’s appointment is that as notification of his appointment as director of the company on 3 June 2019 has been made and the public register now reflects the appointment, the matter is concluded. As such, no determination has been made about late or inaccurate filings in relation to the appointment, if some evidence to the contrary comes to light Companies House would make further enquiries of the company.
There still remains the question of whether Mr Mercer's entry in the Register of Members' Interests was accurate in describing him as a non-executive director in the nine months prior to 3 June, something I have taken up with the Commissioner for Parliamentary Standards.
In any case, now that Mercer is a statutory director he ought to be in a stronger position to back-up his defence of his Crucial Academy salary – which the BBC has alleged to be funded by the failed London Capital and Finance (LFC) bond scheme.
The LCF investigation last week led to the arrest of Paul Careless, who still had a controlling interest in Crucial Academy's parent company when Mercer declared his interest in September, before it was sold to Mercer's fellow director Neil Williams in April.
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