Richard Sharpe: BBC chairman was shareholder in £600,000 awarded company while he was Chancellor No. 10 | Richard Sharp

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Richard Sharpe owns a multimillion-pound stake in a healthcare company that was awarded nearly £600,000 for Covid research While Sharp was working No. 10, it came out.

Sharp, the BBC boss, is the second-largest shareholder in Oncimmune, a cancer screening company that received money in 2020 to help research Covid-19 vaccines and treatments. He was previously a director in the company.

Sharpe, who has come under fire in recent days over allegations that he helped facilitate an £800,000 loan for Boris Johnson, was working as an economics adviser in Downing Street at the time the Oncimmune grant was approved by UK Research and Innovation, which is part of From the business department.

“It’s not surprising that a medical diagnostics company got a contract, but that Sharp is only a major shareholder is strange,” said Nicholas Wilson, the anti-corruption campaigner who disclosed the stake.

A Sharp spokesperson said: “Richard Sharp has been a strong supporter of innovative approaches to tackling cancer and invested in Oncimmune, a leading cancer diagnostics company, when it spun off from the University of Nottingham.

The spokesperson added: “He was not involved in any way with the company’s response to the UKRI Medicines Awards bid for Covid Catapult. [the scheme through which the company was granted the money]His work at the Treasury had nothing to do with UKRI or their medical and scientific research grants.”

A UKRI spokesperson said: “UKRI has rigorous decision-making processes, and the funding decision on this was made on a competitive basis, by expert assessors against publicly published agreed criteria.”

Oncimmune General Counsel Ron Kirchner said, “Richard was not a member of the Board of Directors when the grant application was submitted, which was subject to scientific evaluation. We did not discuss our decision to submit an application with Richard Sharpe, nor did we seek his assistance at any point during the process.”

This week the BBC chief insisted he be given the job on merit, although the circumstances of that appointment are now under investigation by William Shawcross, the Commissioner for Public Appointments.

Sharp had previously advised Johnson when he was mayor of London, and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was at investment bank Goldman Sachs.

In May 2020, he left his job as a non-executive director at Oncimmune, a cancer screening company based in Nottingham, to take up a role in Downing Street advising Sunak, who was a consultant at the time. While working in government, he oversaw a program helping arrange financing for strategically important companies that needed help through the pandemic but were too large for other pandemic support plans.

He’s kept his stake in Oncimmune, which is currently 6.6% according to the company’s website — though he transferred his shares into a blind trust. The stake was worth about £3.8m at the time he left the company, and is now about £3.4m.

Just three months after Sharp left the company to work in government, Oncimmune announced it had won government funding to help adapt its technology to predict how people’s immune systems will respond to Covid-19 vaccines and treatments. UKRI said on Wednesday the company’s stake in the contract amounted to £598,984, and was not linked to the Treasury or to the scheme Sharp oversaw.

Alok Sharma, who was the Business Secretary at the time, said of the contract: “By supporting this pioneering project, we ensure that the best treatment modalities are delivered to the right patients at the right time.”

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