LONDON (Sputnik) – British Prime Minister David Cameron might have to quit because of public discontent over the Panama Papers leak, Deputy Leader of the UK Labour Party Tom Watson said.
According to the information published by Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Ian Cameron was a director of the offshore investment fund Blairmore Holdings, run from the Bahamas. The newspaper obtained the alleged documents in a Panama firm Mossack Fonseca data leak.
Cameron admitted in an ITV News interview on Thursday he had sold his share in his late father's offshore investment fund Blairmore Holdings.
"He's condemned other people in public life for being morally wrong whilst knowing he's had investments in these kind of schemes himself and that shows double standards and people don't like that," Watson told Sky News.
The British prime minister said he and his wife had sold Blairmore Holdings stocks worth about 30,000 pounds (over $42,000 at the current exchange rates). He insisted that his father’s fund was not set up to avoid taxes and stressed that he had nothing to hide about his financial affairs.
"He has to be fully transparent. It's no good just saying he's going to publish his tax returns because that won't show what his investment portfolio was and we need to know that now," the deputy Labour leader stressed.
On Sunday, the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung exposed the alleged involvement of a number of former and current world leaders in offshore schemes by publishing materials it claimed came from Mossack Fonseca, a Panama firm selling offshore companies.
Mossack Fonseca has refused to validate the information contained in the leaks and accused reporters of gaining unauthorized access to its proprietary documents. It warned that using unlawfully-obtained data was a crime that it would not hesitate to punish by legal means.
