Prime Minister Rishi Sunak during Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons in London on Wednesday. PA
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak during Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons in London on Wednesday. PA
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak during Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons in London on Wednesday. PA
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak during Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Commons in London on Wednesday. PA

Rishi Sunak ‘has never paid a tax penalty’


Soraya Ebrahimi
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British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has never paid a tax penalty, unlike Conservatives chairman Nadhim Zahawi, Downing Street said on Wednesday after bowing to pressure.

Initially, Mr Sunak’s spokeswoman insisted the Prime Minister’s tax affairs were “confidential”, as he prepared to publish his tax return in an attempt at transparency.

Eventually, after Labour said leader Keir Starmer had never paid a penalty, Downing Street issued a statement saying: “The prime minister has never paid a penalty to HMRC.”

Mr Sunak’s finances are under renewed scrutiny after it emerged Mr Zahawi settled an estimated £4.7 million ($5.8 million) bill with HMRC while he was chancellor.

Mr Starmer tried to draw a link at Prime Minister’s Questions between Mr Sunak’s handling of the current situation and his billionaire wife Akshata Murty, who has held a non-domiciled status that could have reduced her UK tax bill.

“We all know why the prime minister was reluctant to ask his party chair questions about family finances and tax avoidance," the Labour leader said.

Rishi Sunak through the years - in pictures

Earlier in the day, Mr Sunak’s spokeswoman said he would publish his tax return “in due course” but would not say whether he had ever paid a penalty to HMRC.

“You wouldn’t expect me to get into the prime minister’s tax affairs, they are confidential,” she said.

“The tax affairs of an individual, irrespective of who they are, are confidential.”

Everything you need to know about Rishi Sunak - video

She would not commit to publishing six years of his tax returns, as David Cameron did while prime minister.

In the past, the spokeswoman repeatedly declined to say whether Mr Sunak had private health care as the National Health Service strains under a series of pressures.

She said it was not “in the public interest” to divulge the prime minister’s healthcare arrangements.

But this month Mr Sunak, under pressure, said he was registered with an NHS general practitioner but had used “independent” health care in the past.

Who has been sanctioned?

Daniella Weiss and Nachala
Described as 'the grandmother of the settler movement', she has encouraged the expansion of settlements for decades. The 79 year old leads radical settler movement Nachala, whose aim is for Israel to annex Gaza and the occupied West Bank, where it helps settlers built outposts.

Harel Libi & Libi Construction and Infrastructure
Libi has been involved in threatening and perpetuating acts of aggression and violence against Palestinians. His firm has provided logistical and financial support for the establishment of illegal outposts.

Zohar Sabah
Runs a settler outpost named Zohar’s Farm and has previously faced charges of violence against Palestinians. He was indicted by Israel’s State Attorney’s Office in September for allegedly participating in a violent attack against Palestinians and activists in the West Bank village of Muarrajat.

Coco’s Farm and Neria’s Farm
These are illegal outposts in the West Bank, which are at the vanguard of the settler movement. According to the UK, they are associated with people who have been involved in enabling, inciting, promoting or providing support for activities that amount to “serious abuse”.

Conflict, drought, famine

Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.

Band Aid

Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.

Six large-scale objects on show
  • Concrete wall and windows from the now demolished Robin Hood Gardens housing estate in Poplar
  • The 17th Century Agra Colonnade, from the bathhouse of the fort of Agra in India
  • A stagecloth for The Ballet Russes that is 10m high – the largest Picasso in the world
  • Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1930s Kaufmann Office
  • A full-scale Frankfurt Kitchen designed by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, which transformed kitchen design in the 20th century
  • Torrijos Palace dome
Sole survivors
  • Cecelia Crocker was on board Northwest Airlines Flight 255 in 1987 when it crashed in Detroit, killing 154 people, including her parents and brother. The plane had hit a light pole on take off
  • George Lamson Jr, from Minnesota, was on a Galaxy Airlines flight that crashed in Reno in 1985, killing 68 people. His entire seat was launched out of the plane
  • Bahia Bakari, then 12, survived when a Yemenia Airways flight crashed near the Comoros in 2009, killing 152. She was found clinging to wreckage after floating in the ocean for 13 hours.
  • Jim Polehinke was the co-pilot and sole survivor of a 2006 Comair flight that crashed in Lexington, Kentucky, killing 49.
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Updated: January 26, 2023, 6:31 AM`