International investment litigation; investor-state disputes; crises & special situations for U/HNWs; & corporate criminal defence
United Kingdom
Joined November 2012
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Pinned Tweet
A cartoonist friend has done this fabulous caricature opera poster for me, staring Parsifal (who’s my dog: a standard-sized, wire-haired Dachshund)
🤖 Made with AI
Stephen Lock retweeted
Let’s see how No 10 North is getting on.
Oh, yes.
FIFTY jobs currently being recruited.
A “rewiring the state deputy director”. What on earth is that?!?
These 50 jobs - just a tiny £2.8 million salary bill (EXCLUDING pensions).
Almost £1,000 for a replica No 10 door.
£1,700 on CUTLERY. For “hospitality reasons” of course!
NO ONE voted for this.
It’s NOTHING more than a vanity project.
Burnham will crash and burn sooner rather than later.
Will taxpayers get a refund?
Of course they won’t.
UNFORGIVABLE.
Stephen Lock retweeted
I had a little chuckle at the opening paragraph of Jacob Rees-Mogg's latest piece.
Stephen Lock retweeted
Here's some fuel for all the Europoor haters:
Germany just told us we'd have to fire one of our 3 founders to qualify for funding.
I was in talks with a German state-backed fund of fund managing billions, with one single mandate: invest in German funds to drive innovation and economic growth in the country.
They literally told me they like us a lot and are also impressed by our track record and performance so far, and even though not everyone in their team is a fan of our thesis, they believe in it.
But they passed for a whole different reason:
Because our all-male team of 3 people isn't "diverse enough" lol.
they literally told me: hire two more female partners (impossible on the economics of a fund our size), or let one of the three of us go to make room for a quota hire. do that, and they'd strongly consider investing.
I won't even get into how discriminatory this is toward men in the first place. nobody takes that seriously anyway, and honestly I don't care.
but what actually gets me is something bigger: as a German, I have to face the fact that the whole world continuing to laugh at Germany and overall Europe is completely justified.
a system that quietly kills the smallest, hungriest teams, the exact ones this money was created to support. and then everyone acts surprised that talent and capital keep leaving the country.
Stephen Lock retweeted
The story keeps getting crazier. To recap everything that has been reported so far:
- The US intelligence community discovered that Jensen Huang, the CEO of the largest company in the world, was sleeping with Alice Huang, a Chinese spy and an executive at Megaspeed. (FT)
- Multiple independent investigations have concluded that Megaspeed is likely a Chinese cutout, which helps Chinese companies access AI chips or circumvent export controls. (NYT and Bloomberg)
- The US intelligence community also concluded that Alice Huang’s goal was to convince Jensen to lobby the U.S. government to loosen export controls on advanced AI chips. (NYT)
- The intelligence community relayed this information to “a small group of top US government officials” earlier this year. (FT)
- Over the last year, Jensen Huang has repeatedly lobbied the U.S. government to loosen export controls on advanced chips. @BISgov has done so, not only by permitting the export of H200 chips to China, but also not enforcing export controls that would have required a license for exports of the most advanced Blackwell chips to Megaspeed and Southeast Asia.
- Although @CommerceGov leadership was presumably briefed on this information by the U.S. intelligence community, @BISgov has taken no actions to tighten controls on Megaspeed or Southeast Asia.
- Megaspeed remains a preferred cloud partner of Nvidia, and continues to receive Nvidia Blackwell chips despite employing a Chinese spy who reportedly is romantically engaged with the CEO of Nvidia.
- Tens of billions of dollars worth of AI chips have been exported to Southeast Asia this year alone, and Malaysia and Singapore are now two of the four largest importers of AI chips in the world.
What is going on here??? We need answers. The question of who gets the most advanced AI chips in the world is literally the defining strategic question of our time. And not only does it seem like the MSS may be directly influencing the debate on export controls in the United States, but also @CommerceGov is refusing to listen to the warnings of the IC on this issue. What is a POSSIBLE good explanation for why Megaspeed is still receiving chips? Why is there not a license requirement for AI chip shipments to all of Southeast Asia? This is beyond strange at this point.
The fallout from this story will be massive. Obviously, the motivations underpinning Nvidia’s policy views opposing export controls must now all be questioned. But also, how did @BISgov sit on this information and has still taken no actions? We need answers.
US intelligence agencies believe @Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had romantic relationship with alleged Chinese spy
as.ft.com/r/97c2f9f7-ad2e-44…
We should base a DB pension - if the pernicious things should exist at all - on a five year smoothed salary average, to avoid precisely this taxpayer-defrauding boondoggle
Stephen Lock retweeted
🚨 NEW: Labour MPs have summoned c2c rail bosses to explain the worsening train delays following nationalisation
Since being nationalised, the proportion of trains arriving on time has plummeted from 94% to just 71.5%
[@thetimes]
Stephen Lock retweeted
Dans un dîner à Washington, il m’avait dit qu’il appréciait un français : Charles Maurras…. C’est un réactionnaire obsédé par l’immigration. Il m’avait expliqué qu’il avait survécu à la rotation accélérée des collaborateurs de Trump, en étant toujours plus radical que lui.
Stephen Lock retweeted
In 1991 less than 17% of England's bathing waters were excellent. Today, it's over 73%.
Yet the narrative is that things have got worse, and it's somehow worse to swim in the sea today than at any time in the past.
4.7% of 257 comparable bathing waters were rated Poor in 2025. My estimate for the same waters in 1991 is nearly half, from re-rating Environment Agency sampling data. The standards changed in 2015, so treat the comparison as indicative.
Watch: youtube.com/shorts/W7J6lxZaz…
Stephen Lock retweeted
Right-wing parties the world over now face a simple binary choice:
(a) distance themselves from Israel and America
(b) lose
There is no third option.
Stephen Lock retweeted
The Government is going to miss the 1.5 million homes target.
Homes are now getting built slower than under the previous three Governments.
We need a new wave of planning reform to get back on track.
Stephen Lock retweeted
The Gunpowder plot was the worst thing to happen for ordinary Catholics in Britain and Ireland because it was undeniable proof that fears about a grand Catholic conspiracy were correct. The plotters were responsible for far more innocent Catholics dying through retributive violence.
10y UK gilt yield around 5.15%. Given increased landlord costs & liabilities (not least risks of tribunal-imposed rent control & exposure to defaulting tenants), it just doesn’t make sense to retain a property for long-term let unless you can gross 2-3% over 10y yield (or 7.5-8%)
Stephen Lock retweeted
Nerdy political point... 🤓
Not the biggest issue of the day, but any student of politics will know that that is only one 'Shadow Minister' and that is the spokesperson from the official opposition party (ie. the Tories).
Indeed, I'm old enough to remember when LibDem spokespeople began referring to themselves as a “Shadow Cabinet” back in the early 2000s - to widespread ridicule.
Gordon Brown even got a laugh for this...
The end of Poulenc’s ‘Dialogues des Carmélites’ is one of the most gut-wrenchingly awful - yet also elegiacally ecstatic - moments in opera
Stephen Lock retweeted
Btw Tesco's profit margin is 2.53pc
Imagine turning over 50k in sales and at the end of the year you're left with £1,265 (which is then taxed)
