By Joe Mellor, Deputy Editor
It has emerged that David Cameron will be reported to the Parliamentary Standards commissioner regarding the shares he held in his own late father’s trust, Blairmore.
He will face a sleaze inquiry into why he failed to declare his slice of the offshore fund.
John Mann, Labour MP said he will refer Cameron to the standards watchdog for keeping £30k of offshore shares a secret when he was in opposition, and was climbing up through the party leadership, on his way to the top job.
Mann said: “Action will have to be taken, there’s no question about it. He has broken the rules and principles of standards in public life. Transparency and integrity are two of the basic standards MPs must adhere to.
“This is a matter for the standards commissioner and I will be reporting David Cameron to her.”
During the week news has been drip-fed to the press by Number 10, and finally in an interview he admitted he held a lot of shares in a trust owned by his late father, which was located in the tax haven of the Bahamas.
Cameron sold off the shares in 2010 just before he came into power, after they made £30k from the sale of the shares.
It is not know why he didn’t declare the shareholding with the Parliamentary Register of Members’ Interests, even though he had held them since 2001 when he fist entered parliament as a fledgling MP.
The value of the shares did fall under the threshold at which they must be placed on the register. However, the MPs’ code of conduct does state that any holding under the threshold, which “might reasonably be thought by others to influence his or her actions, speeches or votes” should also be made public.
Cameron has made numerous speeches about tax while not telling the public he was sitting on shares in the offshore fund. He famously laid into comedian Jimmy Carr when it was uncovered he used a shady tax-avoidance scheme.
Pressure is mounting on the PM to step down and #resigncameron was trending on Twitter as this story was published.
Edward Snowden has also called for the PM to tell the whole story about all he knows about the offshore trust.
The PM admitted: “We owned 5,000 units in Blairmore Investment Trust, which we sold in January 2010. That was worth something like £30,000.
“There are millions of people who own shares in Britain, many of whom hold them through unit trusts. And Blairmore was licensed by the Inland Revenue and reported to it every year.”
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