Labor is calling on Rishi Sunak to be more transparent about his finances after the prime ministerial candidate refused to answer questions about the origin of hundreds of thousands of pounds he lent to a company he jointly owned with his wife .
The move is the latest request by the former chancellor to explain details of how he has managed his family’s fortune, which is said to be worth £730m and has led to him being commonly known as the UK’s richest MP.
The vast majority of the Tory leadership candidate’s wealth comes from his marriage to Akshata Murty, a member of the family that founded Indian technology group Infosys, in which he owns a stake worth around £690m.
However, Sunak also worked in the hedge fund industry between 2006 and 2013, raising questions about whether loans he made personally to his UK business came from profits generated in international tax havens.
James Murray, the shadow financial secretary to the Treasury, said: “Rishi Sunak wants to be our next prime minister, but again he can’t seem to give a straight answer to questions about his relationship with tax havens. It’s hard to avoid the impression that he has something to hide.”
Between 2013 and 2014, Sunak lent £652,449 to Catamaran Ventures UK, a company he jointly owned with Murty at the time, according to documents filed at Companies House.
The loans were made shortly after Sunak had worked in America from 2010 to 2013 for the US branch of hedge fund Theleme Partners, where he managed three entities based in the US tax haven of Delaware.
Sunak was entitled to a share of the profits made by one of the Delaware entities, US filings suggest, while industry sources said he was also likely to have invested his own money in the hedge fund.
“Rishi has never used or benefited from a tax haven,” Sunak’s spokesman said, adding that all of Theleme’s U.S. profits were subject to “full U.S. taxation” and that “all profits of the Theleme management group of companies are taxed in the UK. or the US as appropriate”.
However, the spokesman declined invitations to say whether Sunak had made the loans to the UK company from an overseas bank account, or whether the loans had been made from a corporate account abroad, which could have saved Sunak tax by bringing the money into the UK.
Days before becoming an MP in 2015, Sunak transferred his share of the British company and the loan to his wife, a transaction that would have been largely tax-free.
There is no suggestion Sunak has broken any tax laws and he has insisted he has “always been a completely normal UK taxpayer”.
However, the former chancellor has occasionally been embarrassed by his links to people with less conventional tax regimes.
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In April, Sunak and his family were criticized for being able to avoid £20m in tax through Murty’s ‘non-Sunday’ status. After days of negative coverage, she agreed to pay UK tax on her worldwide income in the future and in the last tax year, but remains a non-domiciled citizen.
Murty has also been revealed to be a shareholder in a restaurant business that channeled investments through a company in the tax haven of Mauritius, a structure that could allow its backers to avoid taxes in India. The largest individual shareholder in this business – International Market Management (IMM) – is Hugh Sloane, the co-founder of hedge fund Sloane Robinson, which a court found in 2012 operated a tax avoidance scheme.
The head of Sunak in Theleme, Patrick Degorce, was forced in 2013 to pay millions of pounds in tax after a ruling over a personal investment in a complex film financing scheme, which sought to protect income from almost 19 million pounds
Meanwhile, it was revealed last year that a joint venture between Sunak’s billionaire in-laws and Amazon was embroiled in a multi-million pound dispute with Indian tax authorities.