UTTERLY DUPLICITOUS
The scathing verdict of one Boris ally on Zahawi, the new Chancellor who knifed PM just hours after he promised they’d fight plotters together
NADHIM Zahawi was last night accused of duplicity for pledging to support Boris Johnson despite secretly plotting a leadership bid.
Johnson loyalists were furious as it emerged Mr Zahawi has spent months plotting with allies of election guru Sir Lynton Crosby on a secret plot to become Prime Minister.
They also saw treachery in the Chancellor’s letter calling on Mr Johnson to quit – which came just 36 hours after he accepted the PM’s offer of promotion from Education Secretary to replace Rishi Sunak at the Treasury.
Mr Johnson’s supporters also took aim at Mr Sunak, with Jacob Rees-Mogg ridiculing his attempts to tackle inflation, and labelling him a ‘not very successful chancellor’. It raises the prospect of the PM’s backers trying to scupper the leadership ambitions of two of the stronger candidates.
Last night, one Johnson ally told the Daily Mail: ‘Nadhim Zahawi has been utterly duplicitous. On Wednesday night, he was telling everyone: Me and Boris are going to fight this together.
‘Then he comes out with that letter. His treachery hasn’t gone down well. Today he walked up to a group of Cabinet ministers... and they totally blanked him.’
The multi-millionaire married father- of-three was promoted to Chancellor after he threatened to quit the Cabinet if he was not given the job.
Mr Zahawi – worth up to £100 million – defended the PM on the airwaves on Wednesday morning, but by that evening was in No 10 privately telling Mr Johnson it was time to go. Yesterday morning, he went public with his call for the Prime Minister to quit, saying the country ‘deserves a Government that is not only stable, but which acts with integrity’.
Yet Mr Zahawi, 55, has spent months working on a leadership plan which includes proposals to cut corporation tax and VAT, according to The Times.
The paper said Mark Fullbrook, a founding partner in Sir Lynton’s CT Group who led Mr Johnson’s leadership campaign, was running the strategy. Another CT Group employee, Matt Jackson, is said to be handling the media.
Last night sources close to Mr Zahawi said he was likely to run to be the next Tory leader – but insisted he had not made a final decision. They defended Mr Zahawi’s decision to enter No 11 despite harbouring leadership ambitions. ‘His view is that the country has to have a chancellor. He was offered the opportunity to serve and he thinks that it is the right thing to do.’
But there were calls last night for the Chancellor to ‘come clean’ over his family’s links to tax-haven companies used to buy a Warwickshire mansion and hold £20 million of shares.
Mr Zahawi’s business history has come under increased scrutiny. This includes the role of two offshore companies, based in Gibraltar, which have been linked to Mr Zahawi and his family.
Yesterday tax campaigners said the Chancellor must be ‘100 per cent transparent’ about any tax benefit he or his family may have gained from the arrangements.
Much of Mr Zahawi’s wealth is derived from his stake in YouGov, the international polling company he founded in 2000. YouGov documents show a company based in Gibraltar, called Balshore Investments, held a stake in the pollster worth £21.7 million in 2017. The company, previously named as ‘the family trust of Nadhim Zahawi’, received dividends from YouGov in Gibraltar, which may not have been subject to dividend taxes in Britain.
Mr Zahawi also used a loan from a second Gibraltar firm, called Berkford Investments, to help buy his £1 million constituency home and riding stables, in Warwickshire, according to Land Registry records. The trusts were both managed by Gibraltar-based T&T Management Services, which handles trusts and assets for ‘wealthy individuals and families’, The Guardian reported.
Offshore trusts are a legitimate method of managing wealth. They are widely used to legally reduce the amount of tax payable, or enable transactions to be made confidentially. But campaigners claim they are unpopular with the public because they offer tax benefits to the wealthy, which are not available to workers who pay tax through Pay As You Earn.
Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, said: ‘Nadhim Zahawi must come clean with the British people over his use of tax havens.’
Mr Zahawi has repeatedly said his and his family’s business interests were properly dealt with and declared in his MPs’ register of interests. He said last night: ‘All of my business interests were properly dealt with and declared from 2000. That includes my family.’
Mr Rees- Mogg, meanwhile, trashed Mr Sunak as an unsuccessful chancellor.
The Brexit opportunities minister sought to torpedo his former colleague’s leadership bid by branding him a ‘high-tax Tory’.
Mr Rees-Mogg, who remains loyal to Mr Johnson, told Channel 4 News: ‘ Rishi Sunak was not a successful chancellor... he was a high-tax chancellor.
‘And he was a chancellor who was not alert to the inflationary problem. We are facing internationally the greatest crisis in relation to inflation and I’m afraid the Treasury has not been tackling that properly.’
‘Rishi Sunak was not a successful chancellor... he was a high-tax chancellor’