Jeremy Corbyn accuses PM of misleading public before his revelation he had owned shares in a Panama-based offshore trust

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

David Cameron is facing mounting pressure to make a statement to parliament about the controversy surrounding his tax affairs after his revelation that he owned 5,000 shares in his father’s Panama-based offshore trust.

At the end of a torrid week, the prime minister – who sold his shares in 2010 for £30,000 – was accused by a series of opposition leaders of having misled the public, betraying trust, delivering half-truths and leaving his credibility in tatters.

Many seized on the fact that his admission came after a week in which Downing Street had first refused to answer questions over what it called a “private matter” and then issued a series of statements.



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Jeremy Corbyn called on Cameron to give a “full account of all his private financial dealings” and address MPs when they returned to parliament next week.



“It is now clear that the prime minister has misled the public about his personal involvement in offshore tax avoidance schemes,” the Labour leader said late on Friday. “It took five weasel-worded statements in five days for the prime minister to admit that he has personally profited from an undeclared Caribbean tax haven investment deal.

“After years of calling for tax transparency and attacking complex offshore tax arrangements as ‘morally wrong’, the prime minister has been shown to have personally benefited from exactly such a secretive offshore investment.”

A senior government source hit back by arguing that it was unfair to associate everything offshore with tax avoidance. He said that Blairmore Holdings, set up by Ian Cameron, was “not a vehicle for tax avoidance”.

On Friday night, Channel 4 News reported it they had identified a third offshore fund to which Ian Cameron was connected. The prime minister’s father owned 5,000 shares in a Jersey-based fund called PMG Eagle, the programme said.

The government source defended Downing Street’s handling of the crisis, which included a series of statements denying that the prime minister, his wife or children held any shares or would benefit in the future from offshore funds or trusts.

They said Cameron decided to make a fresh intervention on Thursday night because of concerns about how the controversy was affecting his family, especially his mother.

“There is the human factor. David Cameron was watching the television and so was his mother and brothers and sisters and every time they look up there was an image of his father.”

The source said they were alarmed to see Ian Cameron in amid coverage of people such as Vladimir Putin, dictators and despots, and feared that people would assume “guilt by association”.

But Downing Street’s attempts at damage limitation appeared to be in trouble as some of the prime minister’s assertions came under further scrutiny on Friday.



On another fast-moving day:

Cameron’s claim on Thursday that Blairmore was an ordinary fund that anyone could join began to unravel. In fact, Blairmore has been targeted at professional investors, rather than normal families. Its 2006 prospectus described the fund only open to “high net worth companies, high net worth unincorporated associations and sophisticated investors”. The minimum investment was $100,000 (£70,000).



The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) wrote to three leading City law firms asking them to review their links with Mossack Fonseca. One of them was Simmons & Simmons which advised Blairmore in 2008 how it might move its offshore jurisdiction to Bermuda or the Cayman Islands. The SRA move came a day after the financial regulator wrote to banks with a similar request.

The European commission drafted proposals to compel multinational companies operating in Europe to publicly disclose their profits and bills in tax havens. Officials want the new disclosure rules to apply to all multinationals with a presence in Europe, including internet giants Google, Apple and Amazon.

The UN’s independent expert on foreign debt and human rights, Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky, called on the international community to urgently put an end to financial secrecy. He warned that tax evasion and the flow of funds of illicit origin undermined justice and deprived governments of vital resources.



The Guardian broke the story on Monday that Ian Cameron’s offshore investment fund had paid no British tax in over three decades. The documents were among 11.5m files from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, which were leaked to the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung. It shared them with the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the Guardian, the BBC, and other media partners.

Over the past week the story has caused reverberations in China, Russia, Argentina, Iceland, Pakistan and many other countries.

In spite of Downing Street’s explanations, it was still unclear whether Cameron’s direct relatives, including his mother, Mary Cameron, held money in offshore trusts, and whether his £300,000 inheritance included money accrued from tax havens.



There also has been no further clarification from No 10 about what investments the prime minister and his family may have held in Jersey.

Cameron has promised to publish his tax return and the Guardian understands that he will do so in the coming days.

Downing Street highlighted the prime minister’s own work in driving forward action against tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance, which includes his plans to host a summit on the issue next month.

It also rejected a claim by Labour MP John Mann that Cameron had broken the parliamentary code of conduct by not registering the shareholdings back in 2005, pointing out that the amount was far below the threshold required and that MPs were told “unit trusts” would not normally be listed.



Cameron did receive support from ministers within his government.

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The skills minister, Nick Boles, told Sky News that the prime minister was facing “sustained attacks on the reputation of his father who is dead and who he was very close to and it is a natural reaction to jump to the defence of your father and try [to] prevent any further intrusion into your family life”.

The business minister Anna Soubry insisted the prime minister “has not done anything wrong”, while another senior minister told the Guardian that he was being treated as “guilty before being proven innocent”.



But the pressure on Cameron is likely to rise following Corbyn’s remarks, which came alongside strongly worded statements from the leaders of the SNP, Liberal Democrats and Greens.



Nicola Sturgeon argued that the “tortuous” way the information had come out had left Cameron’s “credibility in tatters and completely betrayed public trust”.

“David Cameron must now be completely transparent around his tax affairs,” she added. “After four days of ducking and diving it is now clear that he personally benefited from offshore investments.”

The SNP’s Westminster leader, Angus Robertson, called for a statement to parliament on Monday, echoing a call from the Green MP Caroline Lucas. The Lib Dem leader, Tim Farron, said the public deserved better than “half-truths and qualified statements”.

Meanwhile, a YouGov poll, carried out just before Cameron’s admission, found that his approval ratings were now at the lowest level since July 2013, and below Corbyn’s for the first time.

The Labour leader went on to accuse Cameron of having a “determination to conceal” his financial arrangement for many years – and pointed to criticism of how the prime minister had acted in 2013 . “It is extraordinary that after pocketing the profits from his offshore investment trust, the prime minister was lobbying the European Union against transparency in the ownership of trusts,” he said.

The former business secretary Vince Cable told the Guardian that his concerns were around Cameron’s commitment to policies he had put in place while in government to tackle tax avoidance.

In particular Cable pointed to a pledge to make offshore companies sign up to a register that was supposed to be open to the public, but which was now only going to be accessible by law enforcement agencies and tax authorities. “This suggests a lack of commitment to the principles he had been setting out – around transparency,” said Cable.



Robert Palmer, head of Global Witness’s money laundering campaign, said: “The government has a big opportunity to break our links to tax evasion, crime and money laundering, but what’s proposed so far won’t cut it. Unless the UK’s tax havens publicly declare the real owners of companies registered there, as will happen in the UK itself from June, we’re just exporting the secrecy offshore.

“David Cameron needs to show leadership on this issue by making that happen at his anti-corruption summit next month.”

The comedian Jimmy Carr compounded Cameron’s woes with a dig at the prime minister, via a tweet on Friday afternoon. In 2012 Cameron publicly criticised Carr for using a Jersey-based offshore scheme, describing it as “frankly and morally wrong”.