He has not criticized tax havens in the House of Commons. And his only reference to offshore was in relation to wind energy. On one level, this is not surprising. Sunak is a former hedge fund manager whose previous employers – Theleme Partners and TCI – both have ties to the Cayman Islands. Prior to that, he worked for Goldman Sachs, the brains of financial engineering. However, this has not been his image since he took over the helm of the Ministry of Finance. Until recently he was in favor of the public for the leave regime, which saved jobs and livelihoods during the pandemic. He also found himself in the difficult position of the so-called “low tax” Tories moving to impose taxes. And Sunak’s personal image was more of a technical brother from California, working spasmodically on his laptop in everyday clothes than a persecuted hedge fund boss. This is probably why both Tory MPs and the public have been surprised by recent revelations about his family’s tax arrangements. It is widely known that he married an extremely wealthy family, to Akshata Murty’s father, an Indian IT billionaire. But even Boris Johnson admitted that he was unaware that Sunak’s wife was not a host and was able to take advantage of this scheme to legally evade the tax of millions of pounds in profits abroad. Further revelations that Sunak held a U.S. green card, indicating permanent residency in the United States, also appear to have failed to hit No. 10. However, clues to Sunak’s worldview persisted throughout. When it backed Brexit in 2016, its models for corporate success and trading partners were the US, India and Brazil. And when he praised the virtues of a “clean stop” exit from Brussels in 2017, he and his fellow Torah MPs argued in the Telegraph, praising his ability to sweep regulations and create low-tax areas for businesses. It wants to turn the UK into a “global hub” for encryption, despite warnings from the Bank of England governor that the asset class is the “new front line for fraudsters”. Sunak also introduced a new low-tax scheme designed in part to benefit some wealthy non-domestic investors, just days before rising national security hit millions of workers at the height of the cost-of-living crisis. The new system – the status of eligible companies – specifically refers to non-household fund managers as a category of people who can benefit from not having to pay taxes on foreign profits through new vehicles. The purpose of the whole system is to try to attract asset managers from low-tax jurisdictions such as Ireland and Luxembourg. According to Richard Murphy of Tax Research UK, this is a first step towards ‘Singapore-on-Thames’ in a post-Brexit UK, with the aim of ‘encouraging the flow of funds through a jurisdiction with little or no tax payable’ “. In addition, when confronted with tax evasion figures from a report by the Guardian, the BBC and others about the massive leak of Pandora offshore documents, Sunak was dismissive. Last year, he argued that “it was not a source of shame” that London had been named the capital of the world’s tax evasion because the United Kingdom had a good track record and was “leading the world” to transparency. And now he is at the center of calls for transparency regarding his own family’s financial affairs. It remains to be seen whether he will be able to delay revealing what he owns and how much tax he pays on it, while he is responsible for UK tax policy at a time when many millions are struggling.
