British Health Secretary Sajid Javid has revealed he held non-domiciled status in the past — as the row over Chancellor Rishi Sunak's tax affairs intensifies.
Javid held non-domiciled status tax from 2000 to 2009, which he was entitled to as his parents were born overseas in Pakistan.
That meant he did not have to pay tax in the UK on his income when he lived worked abroad in New York and Singapore during his career as a banker at Chase Manhattan and Deutsche Bank, before he was first elected to Parliament in 2010.
The health secretary insisted he had "always comprehensively declared all information required."
"I have been domiciled in the UK for tax purposes throughout my entire public life," Javid stressed, adding that he was making the disclosure of his "past tax statuses" due to "heightened public interest in these issues."
"My career before politics was in international finance. For almost two decades I constantly travelled around the world for work," he said. “For some of those years I was non-domiciled for tax purposes, but I paid all UK taxes due on my income and have always done so."
“In 2006 I moved to Singapore with my family and was therefore no longer a UK tax resident," Javid explained. "In 2009, upon my return to the UK, I became tax resident in the UK again and also proactively chose to give up my non-domiciled status by making the UK my ‘domicile of choice’.”
The health secretary said he placed some of his financial investments in an offshore trust before returning to Britain in 2009 and entering politics. After his first appointment to a junior ministerial post at the Treasury in 2012, he "decided to voluntarily collapse that trust, repatriate all assets to the UK and pay 50 per cent income tax on those assets."
Javid insisted that "this approach deliberately incurred the heaviest possible tax burden, and offset any accrued benefits from the previous trust arrangement, but I believed it was the right thing to do."
Sunak wrote to Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Sunday, asking him to refer his tax affairs to Lord Geidt, the independent advisor on minister's interests.
That was after it emerged that he held US 'Green Card' foreign residency status — following the revelation that his wife Akshata Murty, daughter of Indian billionaire businessman N. R. Narayana Murthy, had maintained domicile status in India. Murty has now said she will pay tax on her earnings there in the UK.
Johnson, a native-born New Yorker of Russian-Jewish and Turkish ancestry, only renounced his own dual US citizenship in 2015. That was after the then-mayor of London was forced to pay the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) more than $50,000 in capital gains tax on the sale of his £1.2 million London house — on top of his bill to Her majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) — calling it “absolutely outrageous”.
Javid's meteoric rise following his career in the commodities market has seen him hold the posts of culture and home secretaries and chancellor of the exchequer.
Sunak was Javid's number two as chief secretary to the treasury from 2019 to 2020, when he nabbed his former boss' job as chancellor of the exchequer in Johnson's cabinet reshuffle. Javid was brought back into the cabinet in 2021 after former health secretary Matt Hancock was forced to resign in disgrace.