Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has paid more than £1million in UK taxes over the past three years, details of his tax returns released on Wednesday reveal, as he promised to do so over concerns about transparency.
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In particular, we learn that the Prime Minister has declared more than £4.7 million ($7.8 million) in taxable income over the past three financial years, including £1.9 million for the most recent financial year (2021-2022), which ended from April through April.
In all, he paid £1,053,060 (almost $1.8 million) in taxes to the British tax authorities over those three years.
The Prime Minister, who had a career in finance before entering politics, vowed last summer when he was bidding to succeed Boris Johnson at Downing Street that he would make his tax returns public.
Last year, when he was finance minister, he became the focus of controversy after the press revealed that his wealthy Indian citizen wife Akshata Murty benefited from advantageous tax status.
He had been acquitted of any breach of the Ministerial Code, but his wife announced shortly thereafter that she would renounce that status, allowing him to avoid paying tax to the British tax authorities on his overseas earnings.
Mr Sunak is one of the wealthiest MPs and his fortune has often been targeted by Labor opposition, which have accused the Prime Minister of being out of touch with Britons amid a cost of living crisis.
By releasing these statements, the Prime Minister is delivering on a promise he made when he arrived at Downing Street in late October to show “integrity, professionalism and responsibility”, particularly after the series of scandals under Boris Johnson.
The latter faced a parliamentary inquiry on Wednesday to determine whether he had knowingly lied to Parliament about parties organized at Downing Street in the midst of a pandemic.