Peter Byrne/PA
The Daily Mail’s smear campaign against Angela Rayner over the sale of her ex-council house has merely alerted the public to its owner’s tax affairs, Carol Vorderman has said.
The deputy Labour leader has faced questions about whether she paid the right amount of tax on the 2015 sale of her house due to confusion over whether it was her principal residency.
Rayner has insisted she has “done absolutely nothing wrong” and took legal advice that no rules were broken, but that hasn’t stopped Dan Hodges from orchestrating a relentless smear campaign against her.
Unfortunately for him, his efforts may have merely served to alert the public to the tax affairs of the Daily Mail’s owner, who has some form on the matter.
Lord Rothermere, who is the chairman and controlling shareholder of the Daily Mail and General Trust, has non-domicile (non-dom) tax status and owns his media businesses through a complex structure of offshore holdings and trusts.
But, per Private Eye reports, his non-dom status has come under scrutiny over the years due to his stately home – Ferne House – being in Wiltshire and his status as a Freeman of the City of London.
In fact, the cushy tax arrangements prompted a glorious rant from Ian Hislop on Have I Got News For You a few years ago.
Responding to a piece in the Mail on Ed Miliband’s father claiming he was “the man who hated Britain”, he said:
“On the subject, Hislop said: “”This is the man that hated Britain on the evidence of one entry in a diary when he was sixteen when he’d just arrived as a refugee in this country. It was the most pathetic piece.
“What I think will be embarrassing for the Mail’s Editor is the Mail is owned by the Rothermere family. What did your Dad do? The current Lord Rothermere’s father loved Great Britain so much he went to live in France as a tax exile.
“He then passed on the nom-dom status to his son who doesn’t actually pay the normal amount of tax despite owning a newspaper that’s owned through various tax companies in Bermuda.
“So once you start doing ‘I’m looking at your family’ it gets embarrassing and I think… the Rothermere family, if you want to go further back, we get to the great grandfather who ‘let’s join in together’ ran the headline ‘hoorah for the blackshirts’.”
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