All eyes may be on “Rishi Rich” – chancellor Rishi Sunak, who, with his heiress wife Akshata Murty, has just made it to number 222 on the Sunday Times Rich List with a fortune of £730m – but Sir Nick Clegg is, meanwhile, quietly building up his own fortune.
Mandrake hears the former Lib Dem leader and deputy PM has just bagged an additional £2.7 million worth of shares in Meta – formerly Facebook – where he acts as president of global affairs. His new shares were awarded at nil cost and are reported in the company’s latest investor filings.
They take the number of shares he has in the company to 119,228, which are presently valued at around £19.3m. The papers show he received four lots of shares totalling 16,850 on May 15, with a further 14,782 shares worth £2.4 million sold to “satisfy income tax obligations.”
American public companies are required to update the stock market on share dealings by their executives, with Clegg falling under the disclosure requirements when he was appointed to his new role at the firm in February. Prior to this new role, he was vice-president of global affairs and communications for the firm, a role he took on in 2018.
Clegg demanded that the super-rich should pay more tax when he led the Lib Dems, but it’s not clear if he feels the same way now. Nine years ago, he said: “If we want to remain cohesive and prosperous as a society, people of very considerable personal wealth have got to make a bit of an extra contribution.”
