Ex-minister calls for inquiry into HS2 as he warns of ‘disastrous’ consequences if northern leg is scrapped
A former transport minister who signed off HS2 has told Sky News he wants an inquiry into the chaos of the project “to make sure it doesn’t happen again”.
The northern leg of the high speed rail line – set to run between Birmingham and Manchester – appears to be under threat amid reports the prime minister and chancellor are holding discussions this week on its future due to soaring costs.
Politics Live: Downing Street repeatedly refuses to comment on HS2
Rishi Sunak earlier declined to back building HS2 to the North in the face of warnings by senior Tories not to axe the rail project, hitting out at the “speculation” surrounding its future, but doing nothing to quell fears just ahead of the Conservative Party’s conference.
Former chancellor George Osborne and ex-Conservative deputy prime minister Lord Heseltine were among those saying cutting the Manchester route would be a “gross act of vandalism” and would mean “abandoning” the North and Midlands.
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Rishi Sunak on HS2 ‘speculation’
Norman Baker – a former Liberal Democrat MP who worked as a transport minister in the coalition years – said Mr Sunak had an “anti-rail mindset”, and the rumoured scrapping of the northern leg of the line would be “disastrous”.
Speaking to Sky News at the Lib Dem conference in Bournemouth, he said: “Let’s be quite clear about this. If HS2 is cancelled, it’s not simply a question of inconvenience to passengers.
“There’s going to be job losses in the rail industry. And it’s going to be massive reputational damage to this country.
“People are going to say, what on earth are you doing? You’re cancelling your environmental policies, you’re pulling out of the European Union, you can’t build a railway. Just what is happening with Britain these days?”
Norman Baker was a transport minister for the Lib Dems during the coalition.
Mr Baker – who now works at the Campaign for Better Transport – said people wanted “more HS2, not less HS2”, but criticised the project for being “very badly handled”.
He added: “It’s been hugely expensive. It’s been out of control financially. And we need to have in conjunction with HS2 going head to Manchester and indeed to Leeds as well, we have a proper inquiry as to understand why this has happened and to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
However, the Lib Dems’ transport spokesperson in the Lords, Baroness Randerson, had concerns an inquiry would cause further delays.
Committing her party to the “full” HS2 project, the peer told Sky News: “Every time the government changes its mind, every time the government trims a few hundred yards, a mile or two off, one end or the other, they are pushing up the cost per mile and they are fatally undermining the economic arguments for it, the economic impetus for it, and its potential economic success.
“If you keep chopping and changing, playing the ‘hokey cokey’, as someone put it… then you are going to put in uncertainty, you’re going to drive up the costs and people are going to lose their mission on it.”
Baroness Randerson committed her party to HS2 in “full”.
But instead of an inquiry, she called for a “complete review”, adding: “It needs to be reinstated at the heart of government transport strategy, and then it will serve the north of England in the way it was intended to do, to level up.
“I don’t think we need anything that will impede its progress. We need to get on with it. But what we do, what we do need to do, for the sake of any future project, we need to make sure these mistakes aren’t made again because we have to have consistency.
“We are the nation that invented the railways. Now, 200 or so years on from that and we seem incapable of building a modern railway.”
Read more:
What is HS2 and why are parts being delayed?
Why are so many people upset with rail project?
HS2 was first touted by Labour in 2009, but it was the coalition government that signed off the plan, designed to connect the south, the Midlands and the North of England with state-of-the-art infrastructure.
If the Manchester leg is axed it would be the latest watering down of the project, with the eastern leg to Leeds scrapped entirely and work between Birmingham and Crewe delayed due to the impact of inflation.
Some estimates have put the total cost at over £100bn, while the project has been rated “unachievable” by the infrastructure watchdog.
Pushed on the rumours during a visit to a community centre in Hertfordshire on Monday, Mr Sunak said: “We’re absolutely committed to levelling up and spreading opportunity around the country, not just in the North but in the Midlands, in all other regions of our fantastic country.”
He said that transport is “key” to that vision, “not just big rail projects, but also local projects, improving local bus services, fixing pot holes”.
Pressed for a yes or no answer over whether the northern leg would go ahead, Mr Sunak said: “This kind of speculation that people are making is not right. We’ve got spades in the ground, we’re getting on and delivering.
“Downing Street made clear that he was hitting out at the nature of the speculation, rather than suggesting any of it was incorrect.”
Number 10 refused to provide further details but said there is precedent to delaying aspects of the high speed rail scheme because of “affordability pressures”, pointing towards high inflation.
The prime minister’s official spokesman said that Mr Sunak “always listens to both sides of debate, and it’s for him to make final decisions”.
The uncertainty has fuelled anger among leaders in Manchester, who have sent an “urgent” letter to Mr Sunak warning “the North of England should not have to pay for the government’s mismanagement of the HS2 budget”.
Manchester’s Labour Mayor Andy Burnham and the city council leader Cllr Bev Craig are requesting a meeting with the prime minister as a “courtesy” before a decision is taken, in which they will state “in the strongest possible terms that HS2 should not be scrapped”.
The new trade tariffs announced by US President Donald Trump may place added pressure on the Bitcoin mining ecosystem both domestically and globally, according to one industry executive.
While the US is home to Bitcoin (BTC) mining manufacturing firms such as Auradine, it’s still “not possible to make the whole supply chain, including materials, US-based,” Kristian Csepcsar, chief marketing officer at BTC mining tech provider Braiins, told Cointelegraph.
On April 2, Trump announced sweeping tariffs, imposing a 10% tariff on all countries that export to the US and introducing “reciprocal” levies targeting America’s key trading partners.
Community members have debated the potential effects of the tariffs on Bitcoin, with some saying their impact has been overstated, while others see them as a significant threat.
Tariffs compound existing mining challenges
Csepcsar said the mining industry is already experiencing tough times, pointing to key indicators like the BTC hashprice.
Hashprice — a measure of a miner’s daily revenue per unit of hash power spent to mine BTC blocks — has been on the decline since 2022 and dropped to all-time lows of $50 for the first time in 2024.
According to data from Bitbo, the BTC hashprice was still hovering around all-time low levels of $53 on March 30.
Bitcoin hashprice since late 2013. Source: Bitbo
“Hashprice is the key metric miners follow to understand their bottom line. It is how many dollars one terahash makes a day. A key profitability metric, and it is at all-time lows, ever,” Csepcsar said.
He added that mining equipment tariffs were already increasing under the Biden administration in 2024, and cited comments from Summer Meng, general manager at Chinese crypto mining supplier Bitmars.
Source: Summer Meng
“But they keep getting stricter under Trump,” Csepcsar added, referring to companies such as the China-based Bitmain — the world’s largest ASIC manufacturer — which is subject to the new tariffs.
Trump’s latest measures include a 34% additional tariff on top of an existing 20% levy for Chinese mining imports. In response, China reportedly imposed its own retaliatory tariffs on April 4.
BTC mining firms to “lose in the short term”
Csepcsar also noted that cutting-edge chips for crypto mining are currently massively produced in countries like Taiwan and South Korea, which were hit by new 32% and 25% tariffs, respectively.
“It will take a decade for the US to catch up with cutting-edge chip manufacturing. So again, companies, including American ones, lose in the short term,” he said.
Source: jmhorp
Csepcsar also observed that some countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States region, including Russia and Kazakhstan, have been beefing up mining efforts and could potentially overtake the US in hashrate dominance.
Related: Bitcoin mining using coal energy down 43% since 2011 — Report
“If we continue to see trade war, these regions with low tariffs and more favorable mining conditions can see a major boom,” Csepcsar warned.
As the newly announced tariffs potentially hurt Bitcoin mining both globally and in the US, it may become more difficult for Trump to keep his promise of making the US the global mining leader.
Trump’s stance on crypto has shifted multiple times over the years. As his administration embraces a more pro-crypto agenda, it remains to be seen how the latest economic policies will impact his long-term strategy for digital assets.
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Cryptocurrency exchange OKX is under renewed regulatory scrutiny in Europe after Maltese authorities issued a major fine for violations of Anti-Money Laundering (AML) laws.
Malta’s Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit (FIAU) fined Okcoin Europe — OKX’s Europe-based subsidiary — 1.1 million euros ($1.2 million) after detecting multiple AML failures on the platform in the past, the authority announced on April 3.
While admitting that OKX has significantly improved its AML policies in the past 18 months, the authority “could not ignore” its past compliance failures from 2023, “some of which were deemed to be serious and systematic,” the FIAU notice said.
OKX was among the first crypto exchanges to receive a license under Europe’s new Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation via its Malta hub in January 2025.
The news of the $1.2 million penalty in Malta came after Bloomberg in March reported that European Union regulators were probing OKX for laundering $100 million in funds from the Bybit hack.
Bybit CEO Ben Zhou previously claimed that OKX’s Web3 proxy allowed hackers to launder about $100 million, or 40,233 Ether (ETH), from the $1.5 billion hack that occurred in February.
This is a developing story, and further information will be added as it becomes available.
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Authorities in the US state of Massachusetts continue targeting unlawful cryptocurrency market practices, with a local court fining crypto financial services firm CLS Global.
A federal court in Boston on April 2 sentenced CLS Global on criminal charges related to fraudulent manipulation of crypto trading volume, according to an announcement from the Massachusetts US Attorney’s Office.
In addition to a $428,059 fine, the court prohibited CLS Global from offering services in the US for a probation period of three years.
CLS Global, a crypto market maker registered in the United Arab Emirates, in January pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit market manipulation and one count of wire fraud.
CLS agreed to manipulate the FBI’s “trap token” NexFundAI
The charges against CLS Global followed an undercover law enforcement operation involving NexFundAI, a token created by the FBI as part of a sting operation in May 2024.
CLS Global was among at least three firms that took the FBI’s bait and agreed to provide “market maker services” for NexFundAI, including a fraudulent scheme to attract investors to purchase the token.
In October 2024, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced fraud charges against CLS and its employee, Andrey Zhorzhes. The US securities regulator also filed complaints against two other NexFundAI manipulators, Hong Kong-linked ZM Quant Investment and Russia-linked Gotbit Consulting.
CLS Global’s profile
According to CLS Global CEO Filipp Veselov, the company was founded in 2017 to fill in a “huge gap in the market for high-quality market-making solutions and trading consulting.”
Prior to CLS, Veselov worked at the Russian cryptocurrency exchange platform Latoken, which is advertised as a “global digital asset exchange” and has about 370,000 followers on X.
The CLS team also includes chief revenue officer Pavel Singaevskii, who previously served as sales manager at Stex, a crypto platform that reportedly ceased operations without warning in 2023.
Source: CLS Global
According to CLS Global’s X page, the platform continues operating and has more than 110,000 followers at the time of publication.
How much wash trading is in crypto?
Wash trading is an illegal practice involving artificially inflating trading volume by repeatedly buying and selling the same asset, generating a misleading perception of demand.
According to a January 2025 report by the US blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, the crypto market has at least $2.6 billion in estimated wash traded volumes, or just about 2% of total daily crypto trading volumes, as reported by CoinGecko.
Estimated wash trade volume in crypto. Source: Chainalysis
Related: Russian Gotbit founder strikes $23M plea deal with US prosecutors
Some studies indicate that wash trading makes up a bigger share of the crypto market.
In 2022, the US National Bureau of Economic Research reported that illegal wash trading may account for as much as 70% of average trading volumes on unregulated exchanges.
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