Health secretary Sajid Javid claimed non-domicile status for six years when he was a banker, it has been reported.
Mr Javid admitted to The Times that he had been a ‘non-dom’ between 2000 and 2006, when he was working for Deutsche Bank.
Sajid Javid told the paper that he had qualified for the scheme, which allows someone to not pay UK tax on their overseas earnings, because his father was born in Pakistan.
The revelation comes after The Independent revealed that the chancellor Rishi Sunak’s wife avoided tax through her non-dom status.
The health secretary added that he had also benefited from an offshore trust during his time in the financial sector.
Mr Javid said: “I have been domiciled in the UK for tax purposes throughout my entire public life. Given heightened public interest in these issues, I want to be open about my past tax statuses. My career before politics was in international finance. For almost two decades I constantly travelled around the world for work.”
Sajid Javid, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak during a hospital visit on 6 April
He said that after a posting in New York he returned to the UK, and “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.”
Referring to the offshore trust, he said: “Prior to returning to the UK and entering public life, some of my financial investments were based in an offshore trust. While this was an entirely legitimate arrangement, on becoming a minister in 2012 I decided to voluntarily collapse that trust, repatriate all assets to the UK and pay 50 per cent income tax on those assets.
“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.”
