As an MP he claimed for a mole- catcher ...now company pays for his ‘BUTLER’

JOHN Gummer claimed the cost of his butler as a business expense in order to reduce his tax bill, according to a report. It alleged the staff member – whom Gummer insisted was vital for business – was one of a series of questionable expenses claimed on the books of the family firm, Sancroft International. Others, the report said, included the mortgage on his £5 million townhouse. The report was compiled in 2015 by Merlin Hanbury-Tenison, an Afghan war hero with a masters’ degree from Exeter Business School. He spent several months at Sancroft as a ‘strategy consultant’.

His report said there was nothing illegal about Gummer’s tax avoidance measures but suggested they were morally questionable. The peer had already been forced to pay back more than £10,000 in MPs’ expenses after claiming the cost of a mole-catcher on his Suffolk estate.

According to the report, when Gummer bought his house, Sancroft moved into the lower floors and paid rent to him – which covered the mortgage.

Yesterday, Mr Hanbury-Tenison said that since writing the report, he had come to realise he had ‘misinterpreted’ some things.

In a statement, Gummer’s solicitors said their client did not have a butler, though Sancroft ‘employs someone who looks after business guests by providing tea, coffee, lunches’ and ‘oversees the cleaning of the offices’. Sancroft no longer paid rent for the offices, the statement added, and although it used to do so, Gummer had declared it: ‘The suggestion that he avoided income (or any other) tax in some way is wholly false.’