Little reveals he has no investments!
The Herald reports:
Labour leader Andrew Little has tabled his tax records in Parliament, but failed to convince Prime Minister John Key to follow suit.
Mr Little said the Prime Minister should make a full disclosure to back his statements that all of his tax affairs were above board.
He sought leave during Question Time this afternoon to table his tax forms for the last five years.
The records covered Mr Little’s time as chief executive of the EPMU, where his income rose to $178,000, and his first three years in Parliament.
After tabling the documents, Labour MPs yelled across the House: “Show us yours, John.”
Silly puerile people.
They just want Key to reveal his finances, so they can campaign against him as being a rich prick. They hate his success.
I suspect Key’s tax return would show he pays more in tax than the entire Labour caucus. But that wouldn’t be hard.
Mr Key said he would not release his records, and reiterated that any rumours that he held assets in foreign trusts were false.
He also shot back, saying that Mr Little should be tabling his CV instead, “because he will be out looking for another job soon” – a reference to Mr Little and Labour’s poor poll results.
Just desperate stuff from Labour.
The register of pecuniary interests, published today, confirmed that all of Mr Key’s investments remained in a blind trust, the Aldgate Trust. He was also a beneficiary of the Key family trust.
The register also revealed, however, that Mr Key’s lawyer was the head of a company which specialised in foreign trusts – an embarrassing disclosure in the middle of the Panama Papers debate.
Shock horror – law firms do trusts. Stuff tries to make it a scandal:
Prime Minister John Key has declared a financial link to a company specialising in foreign trusts.
The latest register of MPs pecuniary interests listed the Antipodes Trust Group Limited as a debtor in Key’s entry. The register was released on Tuesday.
On its website, the Antipodes Trust calls itself a specialist provider of trustee and associated services for foreign trusts using New Zealand as their jurisdiction of choice.
I’ve seen a tweet that the short-term deposit is simply from the sale of an apartment in London. As anyone knows when you sell a property it goes into your lawyer’s trust account and they then pay it out to you. So the big scandal is that Key sold an apartment!!
But hey I hope Labour keeps this up, rather than focusing on the economy, jobs, hospitals and schools. I am sure they can drop even lower than 28% if they try.
UPDATE: Felix Marwich has a statement from the PMs Office. The deposit is even more mundane – it is a payment in advance of costs and the money is invested in a NZ trading bank. Yawn.
UPDATE2: As far as I can tell Little has not in fact released his tax returns – merely his wage and salary information. See them at Stuff. They specifically say they exclude income from investments. So what he has released is meaningless – just a schedule of his salary and PAYE.
Now I don’t think Little needs to or should release any information. But when he is trying to take the moral high ground by claiming he has released his tax returns – well the simple fact is he has not. If Key released what Little released, all he would be releasing is his salary as PM and the PAYE on the salary.