Rishi Sunak has refused to repeat Kemi Badenoch’s claim that the former Post Office boss was lying when he said he was told to delay compensation to Horizon scandal victims.
Sir Keir Starmer asked the prime minister if he is prepared to personally repeat the allegation made by his business secretary regarding Henry Staunton.
Mr Staunton, who was sacked last month, has claimed he was told to stall pay-outs to sub-postmasters due to financial concerns ahead of the general election – something Ms Badenoch has strongly denied.
Mr Sunak did not answer the Labour leader’s question directly, simply saying Mr Staunton was fired because of “serious concerns” about his conduct.
He added: “We have taken up steps to ensure victims of the Horizon scandal receive compensation as swiftly as possible… that remains our priority.”
Sir Keir, speaking at PMQs, pressed him on Ms Badenoch’s statement on Monday that Mr Staunton was “at no point told to delay compensation payments by either an official or a minister from any government department; at no point was it suggested that a delay would be a benefit to the Treasury.”
Asked if he will investigate if that statement is correct, the prime minister repeated that Mr Staunton was asked to step down “after serious concerns were raised”.
The exchange comes after an unearthed memo from Mr Staunton which raises questions about Ms Badenoch’s claims.
It has emerged that Mr Staunton wrote a note on 5 January last year which said that Sarah Munby, the then permanent secretary at the business department, had warned him during a meeting that day not to “rip off the band aid” in terms of government finances in the run up to the election.
Henry Staunton
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According to the note, seen by Sky News, Mr Staunton said that the Post Office board had identified a financial shortfall of £160m as of September 2022 and that “there was a likelihood of a significant reduction in post offices” if more government funding was not made available.
He wrote: “Sarah was sympathetic to all of the above. She understood the ‘huge commercial challenge’ and the ‘seriousness’ of the financial position. She described ‘all the options as unattractive’. However, ‘politicians do not necessarily like to confront reality’. This particularly applied when there was no obvious ‘route to profitability’.
“She said we needed to know that in the run-up to the election there was no appetite to ‘rip off the band aid’. ‘Now was not the time for dealing with long-term issues.’ We needed a plan to ‘hobble’ up to the election.”
Kemi Badenoch
Labour MP Liam Byrne, who is chair of parliament’s Business Committee, said the note is “a go slow order, without a doubt”. He said his committee will attempt to “flush out the truth” on Tuesday, when Mr Staunton will appear before MPs.
The note has sparked demands from the Lib Dems for Mr Sunak’s ethics adviser to investigate whether Ms Badenoch misled parliament with her accusation that Mr Staunton was lying.
Labour said there needs to be a cabinet office investigation to establish the veracity of Mr Staunton’s claims.
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Row over disputed memo
Earlier, a government source was dismissive of the memo and suggested Mr Staunton was either “confused or deliberately mixing up” long-standing issues around Post Office finances with the payouts to wrongfully convicted sub-postmasters.
They added: “Even if we trust the veracity of a memo he wrote himself, and there’s not much to suggest we can, given the false accusations he made about the Secretary of State in his original interview, it’s time for Henry Staunton to admit his interview on Sunday was a misrepresentation of his conversations with ministers and officials and to apologise to the government and the postmasters.”
Read More:
Who is Henry Staunton?
The story behind the victims
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Did the government delay Post Office compensation?
Was ousted boss asked to delay compensation payments?
In his original interview with the Sunday Times, Mr Staunton claimed that he was ordered by a senior civil servant to stall spending on compensation for Horizon victims to allow the government to “limp into the election”.
He said it “was not an anti-postmaster thing, it was just straight financials”.
He also claimed that when he was sacked he was told someone had to “take the rap” for the Horizon scandal, which came under renewed public scrutiny following the ITV drama series Mr Bates Vs The Post Office.
Mr Staunton has stood by his claims in the face of government denials, insisting that there was “no real movement” on the payouts until the airing of the ITV drama.
Pic: Reuters
On Monday, Ms Badenoch said the claims are “completely false” and accused Mr Staunton of seeking “revenge” after he was sacked.
She also claimed he was being investigated over bullying allegations before he was dismissed from his short-lived post – something he has denied.
He has said he decided to go public “out of a desire to ensure that the public were fully aware of the facts surrounding the multiple failures that have led to postmasters in this country being badly let down”.
The Horizon scandal saw hundreds of sub-postmasters prosecuted because of discrepancies in the Fujitsu-developed IT system between 1999 and 2015, in what has been called the biggest miscarriage of justice in UK history.
Opinion by: Sergej Kunz, co-founder of 1inch
Institutional players have been closely watching decentralized finance’s growth. Creating secure and compliant DeFi platforms is the only solution to build trust and attract more institutions.
Clear waters attract big ships
Over the past four years, institutional DeFi adoption has gone from 10% of hedge funds to 47%, and is projected to rise to 65% in 2025. Goldman Sachs is reaching their arms to DeFi for bond issuance and yield farming.
Early adopters are already positioning themselves in onchain finance, including Visa, which has processed over $1 billion in crypto transactions since 2021 and is now testing cross-border payments. In the next two years, institutional adoption will speed up. A compliant regulatory framework that maintains DeFi’s core benefits is necessary for institutional adoption to engage confidently.
DeFi’s institutional trilemma
It is no secret that many DeFi security exploits happen every year. The recent Bybit hack reported a $1.4 billion loss. The breach occurred through a transfer process that was vulnerable to attack. Attacks like these raise concerns about multisignature wallets and blind signing. This happens when users approve transactions without full details, rendering blind signing a significant risk. This case calls for stronger security measures and improvements in user experience.
The threats of theft due to vulnerabilities in smart contracts or mistakes by validators make institutional investors hesitate when depositing large amounts of money into institutional staking pools. Institutions are also at risk of noncompliance due to a lack of clear regulatory frameworks, creating hesitation to enter the space.
The user interface in DeFi is often designed for users with technical expertise. Institutional investors require user-friendly experiences that make DeFi staking possible without relying on third-party intermediaries.
Build it right, and they will come
Institutional interest in bringing traditional assets onchain is enormous, with the tokenized asset market estimated to reach $16 trillion by 2030. To confidently participate in DeFi, institutions need verifiable counterparties that are compliant with regulatory requirements. The entry of traditional institutional players into DeFi has led some privacy advocates to point out that it can counter the essence of decentralization, which forms the bedrock of the ecosystem.
Recent: Securitize to bring BUIDL tokenized fund to DeFi with RedStone price feeds
Institutions must be able to trust DeFi platforms to maintain compliance standards while providing a safe and seamless user interface. A balanced approach is key. DeFi’s permissionless nature can be achieved while maintaining compliance through identity profiles, allowing secure transactions. Similarly, transaction screening tools facilitate real-time monitoring and risk assessment.
Blockchain analytics tools help institutions to maintain compliance with Anti-Money Laundering regulations and prevent interaction with blacklisted wallets. Integrating these tools can help detect and prevent illicit activity, making DeFi safer for institutional engagement.
Intent-based architecture can improve security
The relationship between intent-based architecture and security is evident; the very design is built to reduce risks, creating a more reliable user experience. This protects the user against MEV exploits, a common issue of automated bots scanning for large profitable trades that can be exploited. Intent-based architecture also helps implement compliance frameworks. For instance, restricting order submissions to clean wallets and allowing resolvers to settle only the acceptable orders.
It’s well understood that in traditional DeFi transactions, users rely often on intermediaries like liquidity providers to execute trades or manage funds. This leads to counterparty risk, unauthorized execution and settlement failure. The intent-based architecture supports a trustless settlement that ensures users commit only when all conditions are met, reducing risk and removing blind trust from the picture.
DeFi platforms must simplify interactions and UX for institutional investors. This system bridges the gap between. Through executing offchain while ensuring security, the intent-based architecture makes DeFi safer and more efficient. However, one of the challenges to this includes integrating offchain order matching while maintaining onchain transparency.
Late adopters of DeFi will struggle to keep up
For the early adopters of DeFi, there is a competitive advantage in liquidity access and yield advantages, whereas late adopters will face more regulatory scrutiny and entry barriers. By 2026, the institutional players that have failed to adopt DeFi may struggle to keep up. This is seen in the examples of early adopters like JPMorgan and Citi’s early tokenization projects. TradFi leaders like them are already gearing up for onchain finance.
The way forward
Regulatory bodies, supervisory agencies and policy leaders must provide clear, standardized guidelines to facilitate broader institutional participation. Uniform protocols underpinning wider institutional involvement are underway. DeFi platforms must be prepared beforehand to provide all the necessary pillars of compliance and security to institutional players who want to embrace mainstream adoption. Executing this shall require combined efforts from regulators, developers and institutions.
Opinion by: Sergej Kunz, co-founder of 1inch.
This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.
Prediction marketplace Kalshi has started taking Bitcoin (BTC) deposits in a bid to onboard more crypto-native users.
The company that lets users bet on events ranging from election outcomes to Rotten Tomatoes film ratings has seen a strong uptake among crypto traders, Kalshi told Cointelegraph on April 9. For instance, event contracts for betting on Bitcoin’s hour-by-hour price changes have seen $143 million in trading volume to date, a spokesperson said.
Kalshi is a derivatives exchange regulated by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). As of April 9, it listed some 50 crypto-related event contracts, including markets for betting on coins’ 2025 highs and lows, as well as on headlines such as US President Donald Trump’s proposed National Bitcoin Reserve.
Kalshi has doubled down on crypto event contract markets. Source: Kalshi
The platform started accepting crypto payments in October when it enabled stablecoin USD Coin (USDC) deposits.
Kalshi relies on ZeroHash — a crypto payments infrastructure provider — for off-ramping BTC and USDC and converting the deposits to US dollars. The exchange accepts BTC deposits only from the Bitcoin network.
Most Kalshi traders no longer expect core tokens to earn positive returns this year. Source: Kalshi
Related: Kalshi traders place the odds of US recession in 2025 at over 61%
More accurate than polls
Launched in 2021, Kalshi rose to prominence ahead of the US’s November elections.
It became a top venue for trading on 2024 political events after winning a lawsuit against the CFTC, which tried to block Kalshi from listing contracts tied to elections.
The regulator argued that political prediction markets threaten the integrity of elections, but industry analysts say they often capture public sentiment more accurately than polls.
For instance, prediction markets, including Kalshi, accurately predicted Trump’s presidential election win even as polls indicated a tossup.
“Event contract markets are a valuable public good for which there is no evidence of significant manipulation or widespread use for any nefarious purposes that the Commission alleges,” Harry Crane, a statistics professor at Rutgers University, said in an August comment letter filed with the CFTC.
As of April 9, Kalshi traders peg the odds of the US entering a recession at 68%, according to its website.
In March, Kalshi partnered with Robinhood to bring prediction markets to the popular online brokerage platform. Robinhood’s stock rose some 8% on the news.
Kalshi competes with Polymarket, a Web3-based prediction platform. Polymarket processed more than $3 billion in trading volumes tied to the US presidential election despite being off-limits for US traders.
Magazine: Bitcoin heading to $70K soon? Crypto baller funds SpaceX flight: Hodler’s Digest, March 30 – April 5
Politics
No crypto project has registered with the SEC and ‘lived to tell the tale’ — House committee hearing
United States securities laws are not flexible enough to account for digital assets, as evidenced by the parade of crypto-native companies that have tried and failed to get into the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) good graces, Rodrigo Seira, special counsel to Cooley LLP, told a House Committee hearing on April 9.
The hearing, titled American Innovation and the Future of Digital Assets Aligning the U.S. Securities Laws for the Digital Age, featured Seira, WilmerHale partner Tiffany J. Smith, Polygon chief legal officer Jake Werrett and Alexandra Thorn, a senior director at the Center for American Progress.
“It is clear that the current securities regulatory framework is not a viable option to regulate crypto. It fails to achieve its stated policy goals,” Seira said in his opening remarks. “[T]he idea that crypto projects can come in and register with the SEC is demonstrably false.”
Cooley LLP special counsel Rodrigo Seira addresses the committee on April 9. Source: House Committee on Financial Services
Seira acknowledged that crypto promoters who raise capital for a new enterprise should be subject to federal securities laws.
“In practice, however, virtually no crypto projects have successfully registered their tokens under federal securities laws and lived to tell the tale,” he said, adding:
Projects that tried to comply with [the] SEC’s current regulatory requirements expended significant resources and effort only to fail or survive in a state of regulatory uncertainty. Moreover, registration is not a simple one-time process. Registering a token in the same manner as a stock triggers an obligation to operate as a publicly reporting company […].”
Related: Crypto has a regulatory capture problem in Washington — or does it?
Righting the ship
In introducing the witnesses, Representative Bryan Steil, who heads the Subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology, and Artificial Intelligence, acknowledged regulatory roadblocks, which he said were put in place by the previous administration.
Congressman Bryan Steil addresses the hearing on April 9. Source: House Committee on Financial Services
Under President Donald Trump, lawmakers are attempting to right the ship by passing sensible legislation, said Steil.
One of the first steps occurred last week when the House Financial Services Committee advanced the STABLE Act, which is designed to regulate payment stablecoins tied to the US dollar and other fiat currencies.
Source: Financial Services GOP
A month earlier, the Senate Banking Committee advanced the GENIUS Act, which aims to regulate stablecoin issuers by establishing reserve requirements and requiring full compliance with Anti-Money Laundering laws.
The next step is “advancing the second half of this agenda: comprehensive digital asset market structure legislation,” said Steil.
Representative Ro Khanna told a digital asset conference last month that a market structure bill will cross the finish line this year.
The purpose of such legislation is to establish a clear regulatory framework for digital assets, including their legal categories and the enforcement jurisdiction of agencies such as the SEC and Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
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