Tory MP demands probe into how Vaz can afford ‘8 houses on £90,000 salary’
‘Transparency is urgently needed’
LABOUR MP Keith Vaz could be investigated after reportedly amassing a £4million property empire on a salary of £90,000.
Mr Vaz, 61, who once had his own chauffeur, is said to own eight UK properties and one in India, and sends his two children to private school.
Tory MP Andrew Bridgen claimed his income did not justify the expenditure and has called on the National Crime Agency to investigate using new powers created to tackle criminal gangs.
In a letter to Lynne Owens, the agency’s director-general, he asked for Mr Vaz to be made subject to an ‘unexplained wealth order’, which was introduced last year in the Criminal Finances Act.
Citing publicly available reports, he alleges that Mr Vaz ‘has amassed an eight-home UK property empire valued at over £4million, despite earning a salary of around £90,000’.
He claimed Mr Vaz paid for one home in cash, and had declared less than £12,000 in outside earnings since May 1997, other than from renting out flats.
Mr Vaz earns £74,962 as MP for Leicester East. But he was also paid an extra £15,025 a year when he was chairman of the Commons home affairs committee.
A spokesman for Mr Vaz, who quit as committee chairman in September 2016 after he was alleged to have paid male escorts, said the allegations about his wealth were ‘entirely unfounded’.
But Mr Bridgen said: ‘Given these circumstances, I believe an unexplained wealth order investigation would be warranted as it appears Mr Vaz’s lifestyle and expenditure are completely unaffordable given his declared income. It is important that the public can have trust and confi- dence in their elected representatives and in this matter I believe transparency is urgently needed.’
But despite the suggestion that Mr Vaz owns eight British properties, The Sunday Times reports that he claims to own only four, one jointly with his wife, and has total outstanding loans on the properties of £850,000, which is serviced by £60,000 a year in rental income.
House of Commons rules require MPs to declare details of investment properties worth £100,000 or more. They must also declare any buy-to-let properties with a combined rent of more than £10,000 a year, although they do not have to register homes they use themselves.
Mr Vaz has registered a house in Leicester and two flats in London.
According to the land registry, he bought a semi-detached house in Leicester in 1985 now worth £330,000, which he uses partly as his constituency office.
His family home is a five-bedroom detached house in north west London, which he bought for £1.15million in 2005 and which is now thought to be worth £2.25million.
It has been reported that Mr Vaz bought a flat in central London for £545,000 in 2004, inherited a house next to his office in Leicester worth an estimated £140,000 in 2005, and paid £387,000 for a flat in north London. His wife Maria Fernandes, an immigration lawyer, bought a flat in central London for £465,000 in 2015 and paid £400,000 for a three-storey villa in Goa in 2007.
He is already subject to a Commons standards investigation over claims that he paid male escorts while leading an inquiry into vice laws. The probe was suspended in December for medical reasons.
Unexplained wealth orders, which came into effect on January 31, enable officials to make anyone under investigation account for assets deemed inconsistent with their income.
A spokesman for Mr Vaz told Mail Online: ‘Mr Vaz considers Mr Bridgen’s cowardly actions in peddling malicious, highly defamatory and utterly false allegations in this way to be wholly reprehensible, albeit unsurprising given Mr Bridgen’s track record.
‘Mr Vaz will be considering appropriate legal action against Mr Bridgen and also ask the NCA or other relevant authorities to investigate Mr Bridgen for wasting public resources by pressuring them into investigating his vexatious and malicious “complaints”.’
He said all Mr Vaz’s properties were declared in the Commons register of interests, Mr Bridgen had exaggerated their value, and the expenditure was part-funded by his wife, who owns a law firm.