By Paul Homewood
LONDON/NEW YORK (Reuters) -Britain on Thursday named Oxford University professor Rachel Kyte as its new climate envoy and announced a new investment facility, the latest steps in the new government’s efforts to bolster Britain’s role in international climate politics.
The appointment of Kyte, a climate policy professor, as the UK’s special representative for climate comes six weeks before COP29, the latest annual U.N. climate summit.
Countries from around the world will meet in Azerbaijan to try to thrash out new deals to halt rising global temperatures, mitigate the damage they have caused and raise funding for those who have been worst affected.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/uk-names-rachel-kyte-climate-162858001.html
So who is Rachel Kyte?
LABOUR’S appointee to a plum government job is linked with a Cayman Islands-based hedge fund which donated £4 million to the party, The National can reveal.
Rachel Kyte has been appointed to the revived UK Government climate envoy role – which when it last existed commanded a salary of at least £130,000.
She is the co-chair of the Quadrature Climate Foundation’s advisory board, which was founded by the same people behind the hedge fund Quadrature Capital.
Quadrature, which holds hundreds of millions of pounds of shares in fossil fuels, private health firms, and arms manufacturers, donated £4m to Labour ahead of the General Election, the investigative news site openDemocracy revealed earlier this month.
The site said its latest filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission from August showed it had hundreds of millions of dollars invested in oil firms including Cenovus, which earlier this year was fined for an Atlantic oil spill.
It also held a $6m in arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin, investments in US private healthcare firms and massive asset management firms such as Blackstone and KKR.
The donation only came to light months after the election because it had been made in a brief window where the election donation reporting rules had not come into force after Rishi Sunak announced the date of the ballot.
It is said to be the sixth-largest donation in British political history. ….
But her links with Quadrature Capital have raised questions for the Government over the firm’s financial ties to Labour.
https://www.inkl.com/news/labour-s-new-climate-envoy-linked-with-4m-party-megadonor-hedge-fund