Complicated spring for the Minister of Finance of Boris Johnson† After the fierce criticism of the millions his extremely wealthy wife has saved in taxes, the setbacks have been linked for Rishi Sunak, whose tax provisions go bad on Saturday amid a purchasing power crisis.
Until recently, the darling of conservatives, Rishi Sunak was accused of hypocrisy and lack of transparency after admitting that until last year he had a US “green card” granting him permanent resident status. UNITED STATESwhere he filed tax returns while a British minister.
The trouble started for the minister earlier this week when the press revealed that his wife Akshata Murty, an Indian billionaire whose wealth is that of the queen of englandenjoyed a privileged tax status which prevented him from paying tax to His Majesty’s tax authorities on his income received abroad.
“The problem is that the Minister of Finance has not been transparent”
When Akshata Murty announced on Friday that she was giving up her benefits so as not to be a “distraction” for her husband, Rishi Sunak has “tried several times to cover his tracks” regarding his family’s tax schemes, Labor MP Louise Haigh said on Saturday. on the BBC microphone.
Akshata Murty has not broken any law, but “the problem is that the finance minister was not transparent (…) about his wife’s tax status. He was not transparent about the fact that he green card in the United States and filed tax returns there. Not only when he was an MP, but also when he was finance minister,’ she noted.
It benefits from trusts in tax havens
Friday, the British newspaper the independent also revealed that Rishi Sunak was one of the beneficiaries of trusts in the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands (two tax havens) established to manage his wife’s tax affairs. According to a spokesman for the Sunak family, “no one in Akshata’s family is aware of the existence” of these trusts.
Be that as it may, the cascading revelations about the minister and his wife are failing at a time when British households are being strangled by steep price increases. Still a petty darling of Conservatives, the eloquent 41-year-old minister’s popularity plummeted after he announced aid measures deemed far from commensurate with the historic decline in purchasing power.