The SoftBank Vision Fund is on the verge of agreeing to invest £500 million in a privately held finance company where former UK Prime Minister David Cameron has worked as an adviser since his departure from government… The deal to invest in UK-based Greensill, which operates in the niche business of supply chain finance, will nearly double the group’s valuation to about £3 billion and give the Vision Fund a stake of between 15 and 20 per cent… The Vision Fund is a unit of Japan’s SoftBank, the telecoms-to-technology conglomerate whose holdings include UK chip designer Arm. The fund is led by Rajeev Misra, a former debt trader at Deutsche Bank and UBS, who reports to SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son… Greensill is a specialist in supply-chain finance, where businesses raise funding backed by their payments to suppliers. Lex Greensill, a close friend of Mr Cameron who served as an adviser to his government, founded the company in 2011 after working at US investment banks Morgan Stanley and Citigroup. Mr Cameron is also an adviser to the company and helped it secure a $250 million investment from US private equity group General Atlantic last July that valued the company at $1.6 billion.

Robert Smith and Arash Massoudi