Panama Papers

Caroline Lucas Excerpts

Monday 11th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right about that. I would reinforce the point that many millions of our fellow citizens own shares, and many people choose to make their investments through unit trusts, which are a relatively safe form of investment because they share the risk. Many unit trusts are listed in other countries—many of them now in Dublin—and they are set up in that way not to avoid tax but to make sure that the revenues are returned to the unit trust holder who then pays tax, which is the key point.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

Does the Prime Minister accept that the revelations last week that he intervened personally in 2013 to water down the effects of EU transparency rules on trusts damages his efforts to portray himself as some kind of champion of fair tax? Will he now commit to fully supporting EU transparency rules, including country-by-country reporting by corporations showing exactly how much profit they make and where?

[The Prime Minister]

Let me be absolutely clear with the hon. Lady. There were no EU proposals—the whole thing was based on a British proposal or initiative to encourage all countries to have registers of beneficial ownership. The EU then joined in and suggested extending it to trusts, and we pointed out that if that happened no one would take it up because trusts, as she knows, are set up for all sorts of reasons: the care of a disabled child, support for a local school—any number of things that are perfectly reasonable under English common law. The advice I had was that if we went for beneficial ownership of companies and trusts, the move that we have made, which is genuinely helping to change the world in that regard, would have completely failed.