Questions over whether Iain McNicol was within lobbying rules when he wrote to civil servants about company that was paying for his advice

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A Labour peer who served on Keir Starmer’s frontbench wrote to the Treasury on behalf of a cryptocurrency firm that was paying him as an adviser, raising questions about whether this was within the rules.

Iain McNicol, 55, advised the Dubai- and Zurich-based Astra Protocol, a tech startup that launched a cryptocurrency token, which has plunged in value by 99.7% since its peak.