Family’s £4m property empire
THE Vaz family own a £4million property empire comprising at least six homes and offices, it can be revealed.
The extraordinary value of the portfolio dwarfs Keith Vaz’s MP salary.
Mr Vaz, 59, and his wife, Maria Fernandes, 57, live in a £2.2million five-bedroom detached house, and have bought and sold a string of properties since the 1980s.
The MP’s latest acquisition was the ‘sex flat’ in which he met the rent boys, near his marital home in Edgware, north London.
He put down £387,500 in cash – more than four times his £89,951 salary as a senior backbench MP – to buy the two-bedroom apartment in June. Yesterday more questions were asked about how he could afford it. Mr Vaz had explained the purchase by saying he had taken out a ‘personal loan’ to fund the sale.
This loan would be repaid, he claimed, by selling a house in Leicester which he inherited from his mother. Mr Vaz had bought that house in 1989, which his mother then bought off him and subsequently bequeathed back to him. Mr Vaz is now the registered sole owner of the house which is rented out to a family.
His lawyer, Mark Stephens said the property was worth in excess of
£200,000 – which means there is still a significant shortfall in funding Mr Vaz’s ‘sex flat’ purchase. it would leave him £187,500 short of being able to repay his loan.
asked how he was funding the remainder – a sum which is still double his MP’s salary – Mr Stephens said Mr Vaz would keep it on as an outstanding loan from accord Mortgages.
Beyond his London family home and the ‘sex flat’, the other properties owned by Mr Vaz and his wife are the house bequeathed to him in Leicester and the home next door – which he uses as a constituency office.
there is another London flat too, from which he derives more than £10,000 a year in rental income. the sixth property is an office in northwest London, where his wife runs her business as a solicitor. She paid £485,000 for the office in 2010, with the help of a Lloyds Bank mortgage.