Cameron knew Ashcroft was non-dom
Updated on 04 March 2010
He has refused to answer questions about it for days, but today it emerged that David Cameron was told about Lord Ashcroft's non-dom tax status "within the last month".
Not that the news came from Mr Cameron himself - which begs further questions over his handling of the affair.
However, Lord Ashcroft was cleared by the Electoral Commission over his firm's five million pounds of donations. But the commission was not happy with Conservative officials, who refused to co-operate with their inquiry.
A month ago David Cameron gave a speech about rebuilding trust in politics. Now we discover that at around that time he learnt his deputy chairman and billionaire donor Lord Ashcroft had broken a promise made to his party and the public when he was awarded his peerage.
Lord Ashcroft kept everybody in the dark for almost a decade that he had not fulfilled his pledge to become a permanent UK resident.
It was only within the last month that he came clean with his party leader that he is a non-dom who does not pay UK tax on his overseas earnings.
And David Cameron concealed that knowledge of his benefactor's tax status until today, when he dispatched his shadow cabinet colleague to break the news.
David Cameron has been asked repeatedly about Lord Ashcroft's tax status. And he has always insisted he was happy the peer has stuck to his promise.
Just this week, after Lord Ashcroft himself admitted he was a non-dom, the Tory leader refused to disclose when he knew. If he wanted to restore trust in politics, critics say, he should not have had to have the truth dragged out of him.
Labour says either David Cameron has misled the public because he has known all along his deputy chairman was a non-dom, or Lord Ashcroft has misled him.
Embarrassingly for Cameron, it looks as if his colleague William Hague knew the peer was a non-dom at least a month before him. It is not clear why Hague did not fill his boss in.
A shadow cabinet minister told Cathy Newman this afternoon that this cannot happen again. Another frontbencher said Lord Ashcroft might have got a ministerial post if the Tories won the election – but this will not happen now.
The Electoral Commission has been investigating if the Tories had broken the law by accepting more than £5m from Bearwood Corporate Services, a UK arm of Lord Ashcroft’s Belize-based business empire.
Today the commission cleared the company's donations to the Conservatives, but it accused the Conservatives of refusing to allow its officials to be interviewed, and it accused Lord Ashcroft of destroying documents crucial to its inquiry.
Jenny Watson, chair of the Electoral Commission, told Channel 4 News: "On the basis of the evidence we have before us, we have conducted a very thorough investigation and we have reached a very firm conclusion.
She admitted: "We would have liked to be able to interview staff and officers from the Conservative party. They provided us with a huge mass of documentation and full written evidence from their registered treasurer via their solicitors…
"There is no law that means they have to attend for an interview. We can't compel them to do so, and we were disappointed that we couldn't reach an agreement with the party on that point."
Ms Watson refused to speculate on what the commission might have concluded "if we'd have had another document or if we'd have had another interview.
"The point is, we've looked at the facts of this case before us and we've applied the law and the tests that parliament said – and we've come to a very clear conclusion in this matter."
She went on to say that there was cross-party agreement on the need for a widening of the Electoral Commission's powers. "Those new powers will enable us, where we think somebody might relevant information, to ask for that information and to ask for interview, and to compel people to do so."
