The Nadhim Zahawi saga shows no sign of concluding. Every time the story looks like burning out, a new disclosure gives it legs. Tonight, it’s the revelation by the Financial Times that a second senior Tory MP was being investigated by HMRC last summer around the same time as Zahawi. It’s a curious tale, based on a freedom of information request by tax expert Dan Neidle – a man who ought to earn some sort of gong for services to the Labour party.
In response to Neidle’s request for information, HMRC admitted on 15 June that an unnamed minister was under investigation. Eight days later though, as the FT was about to publish a story on 23 June, HMRC claimed that no ministers were in fact being scrutinised, prompting the paper to pull the planned article. A fortnight after that, on 7 July, HMRC changed its position once again and admitted that, er, a minister was, indeed, under investigation. Why the confusion?
Well, according to the FT’s Jim Pickard, internal emails suggest that officials initially trawled an inaccurate list which came up with the name of a senior Tory MP who was not a minister. Their name is unknown but, according to Pickard, ‘they were clearly senior enough to be mistaken for a minister by someone in HMRC’ – hence the denial of 23 June. They then compounded that first error by a second, only searching those involved in self-assessment disputes and not the Customer Compliance Group, which includes the Fraud Investigation Service and Counter-Avoidance. A subsequent, wider search here subsequently turned up Zahawi.
The question remains though: who was the second, unnamed Tory MP probed by HMRC? And will their identity – like Zahawi’s – find its way into the public domain?
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