David Cameron paid almost £76,000 in tax on an income of more than £200,000 in 2014-15, figures released by the prime minister have shown.
He earned £46,899 in rent on the London family home, the first such papers released by a UK prime minister reveal.
They show he inherited £300,000 when his father died, and the next year was given two payments of £100,000 by his mother to balance out the legacy.
Mr Cameron announced a new task force to investigate tax-dodging allegations.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said the matter highlighted “a whole ethos” and how the very wealthy handled their tax affairs, adding he would publish his own tax return “very, very soon”.
On Saturday, the prime minister admitted he could have better handled the row over his financial affairs.
“Don’t blame Number 10 Downing Street or nameless advisers, blame me,” he said.
‘Not a great week’
This followed a week of questions and successive statements over whether Mr Cameron had owned and sold units in an offshore fund run by his late father, Ian Cameron.
Details of the Blairmore Holdings fund had been contained in a leak of 11 million documents, known as the Panama Papers.
The figures released by the prime minister show:
- He and his wife Samantha made a £19,000 profit from the sale in 2010 of their shares in the Blairmore Holdings fund
- Mr Cameron declared a £9,501 share of that profit, below the then £10,100 capital gains tax threshold
- Mr Cameron inherited £300,000 when his father died in 2010
- He was later given two payments of £100,000 by his mother in May and July 2011 in an attempt to balance out the legacy between Mr Cameron and his siblings
- In 2014-15, David Cameron paid £75,898 in tax on £200,307 earnings
- On top of his prime ministerial income, and the London rent, he last year received £9,834 in taxable expenses from the Tory party and £3,052 in interest on savings at a High Street bank
- He earned enough to benefit from the 2013 cut in the top rate of tax from 50p to 45p (for people earning more than £150,000)
- In 2010 when he first entered Downing Street, he took the prime ministerial expenses deduction – a £20,000 tax-free allowance – as part of his £142,500 salary
- But he voluntarily cancelled out the allowance by declaring the equivalent amount as taxable income from 2011-12, 2012-13 and 2013-14, before waiving it from 2014-15
The PM said he was publishing the information to be “completely open and transparent” about his financial affairs.
Solicitor Robert Levy, who specialises in tax affairs, told the BBC there was nothing in the tax returns that made him “raise his eyebrows”.
On the matter of the two £100,000 gifts from Mr Cameron’s mother, Mr Levy said: “It’s not unusual for parents to make gifts to children. It’s just the figures here are larger than they might otherwise be.”
Mr Cameron’s inheritance of £300,000 from his father had been just below the inheritance tax threshold (£325,000) so people “put two and two together and often make five”, he said.
It was hard to know if they were in any way connected without more information, he added, “but it didn’t look to me when I looked at it that it was something that looked wrong.”
Addressing the Tories’ spring forum on Saturday, Mr Cameron had said he was to blame for the handling of revelations about his investment in the Bahamas-based Blairmore Holdings fund.
“It has not been a great week. I know that I should have handled this better. I know there are lessons to learn and I will learn them,” he said.
“Don’t blame Number 10 Downing Street or nameless advisers, blame me.”
As he was speaking, hundreds of protesters marched through Whitehall calling on Mr Cameron to “close tax loopholes or resign”.
Furore
The fund was named in the leak of documents belonging to Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. They revealed Ian Cameron had been a client of Mossack Fonseca when establishing the fund for investors.
The prime minister first promised his tax return data in 2012 but details for the past seven years have now been made public in the wake of the furore over the documents.
Source BBC
