After several months on the back foot, Boris looks ready to sink Ken’s
campaign for good. The cries of hypocrisy have been growing louder and louder since the revelation that Ken has been filtering his six-figure income
through a limited company to avoid thousands in tax. Ken has waited two weeks for the story to build up before making an official response on the Andrew Marr show yesterday:
He’s not wrong but it doesn’t address why Ken has a small business in the first place. Ken is not a corporation with employees and assets — it’s just him and his wife. And yet Ed Miliband toed a similar line at a pre-Budget press conference today. When someone raised the issue of tax avoidance, he responded that Ken had ‘paid all the tax he has to’ in a ‘similar scheme’ to Boris.‘I am in exactly the same position as everybody else who has a small business. I mean, I get loads of money, all from different sources, and I give it to an accountant and they manage it.’
But Boris has always maintained he’s completely clean on tax and isn’t the director of any company. He’s taken umbrage at Ed’s accusation and sent an angry response via Guido:
As Andrew Gilligan noted in this week’s magazine, it’s long overdue for Boris to up his game against an easy opponent. Although this new-found success is not entirely of his own doing, many of the campaign issues I’ve written about earlier — sloppiness, speed and fericity of attacks — seem to have been addressed. If Team Boris keeps this up, they might just win the May election.‘My salary as Mayor is taxed as an employee of the GLA. In the same way as when I was an MP my salary was taxed as an employee. Any other income that I have received from outside endeavours has been received on a self-employed basis, to me as an individual (no company or other structure has been involved). No income earned by me has ever been paid to a “service” company, through which a person or person’s freelance earnings can be channeled so that they pay corporation rather than income tax.’
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