Lord Moonie, 61, wasted no time in lining up well-paid jobs in the lobbying industry when he was elevated to the peerage in 2005.
Within weeks of leaving parliament the former Labour MP became an associate director of Sovereign Strategy, a lobbying firm which has made substantial donations to the Labour Party.
He claimed at the time that his role would not be to lobby the Government in person, but "to teach clients how to lobby government".
It is a distinction which he seems to have since abandoned, as on the current register of Lords' interests, he lists a £35,000-a-year consultancy with the property firm Americum Developments in Edinburgh under "parliamentary lobbying".
He is now said to have offered to help an undercover journalist to help amend laws in return for an annual fee of £30,000, allegedly boasting that if he was rumbled, the House of Lords authorities could do little but "jump up and down".
As a junior minister during his 18 years in the Commons, Lord Moonie spent time as a spokesman on industry and on technology, and was a junior defence minister.
Although he was largely anonymous in the roles, they have stood him in good stead since he became Lord Moonie of Bennochy in Fife; he now acts a non-parliamentary consultant to the specialist information technology firm Northrop Grumman, the security consultancy Perseus Global and to PharmAthene, which makes antidotes to chemical and biological weapons.
He is also a paid director of the climate change consultancy AEA Technology and of the online gambling site PartyGaming.
Lord Moonie gave up his parliamentary seat as a favour to his personal friend Gordon Brown, to make sure the then Chancellor retained a safe majority after constituency boundaries had been redrawn.
Married with two children, Lord Moonie is a qualified psychiatrist who studied at St Andrews and Edinburgh Universities and worked in Switzerland and the Netherlands before returning to Fife as a senior registrar. He was elected to the local council in 1982 and became an MP in 1987.
The former Lewis Moonie sits on the economic affairs and finance committees in the House of Lords and divides his time between homes in Fife and Pimlico, west London.
Questions on defence asked by Lord Moonie since September 2008: 40
Questions on defence asked by Lord Moonie before September 2008: 6
Parliamentary pass obtained by Lord Moonie for defence lobbyist: Autumn 2008
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