So, sue me! ‘Horrid’ Miliband set to accept Fink challenge

Ed Miliband is ready to risk being sued for libel by repeating his accusation of “tax-dodging” against the Tory Party treasurer Lord Fink outside the protection of the Commons where he is covered by parliamentary privilege.

Lord Fink wrote to Miliband last night saying: “I challenge you to repeat your allegation outside the House of Commons – or to withdraw it publically.”

According to his aides, Miliband will pick up the gauntlet and - according to his aides - repeat the allegations in a speech in London today. It raises the intriguing prospect of a future prime minister being landed in the High Court after polling day.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

In one of the stormiest sessions of Prime Minister's Questions in this parliament, Miliband mounted a ferocious personal attack on David Cameron for giving rewards to tax-avoiding Tory donors. He said Cameron was “bang to rights”, adding: “He can't get away from it – he's a dodgy Prime Minister, surrounded by dodgy donors...There's something rotten at the heart of the Tory Party and it's you.”

The Daily Mail reports that Cameron was overheard telling Conservative ministers as he left the Chamber: “Ed was personally horrid to me because he was losing.”

During the Commons exchanges, Miliband said: “Let’s take Stanley Fink who gave £3 million to the Conservative Party. He [Cameron] actually appointed him as Treasurer of the Tory Party and gave him a peerage for good measure.

“So now can he explain what steps he is going to take to find out about the tax avoidance activities of Lord Fink?”

In his letter, Lord Fink insisted he only opened an account with HSBC in Switzerland because he was working in Switzerland at the time for the Man Group, and it was not to avoid UK taxes.

Asked on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning whether Miliband's camp thought that Lord Fink had given a convincing answer to the allegations, Norman Smith, the BBC’s assistant political editor, said: “Convincing or not, Ed Miliband stands by them.

“More to the point, he is going to repeat them in public at a speech in London because they [Labour] take the view the allegations stack up, that Lord Fink was involved in tax avoidance activities.

"They believe his denial referred very specifically to his account with HSBC Swiss and there are questions about other accounts he holds.”

Any legal action against Miliband would likely depend on the actual terms the Labour leader uses in his speech today: ‘tax avoidance’ is not a criminal offence, though ‘tax evasion’ is. In the Commons, Miliband limited his charge against Lord Fink to tax avoidance with the use of an HSBC Swiss bank account.

But Miliband's attack puts the Conservative party’s attitude to tax avoidance - and Whitehall’s failure to probe HSBC’s complicity in tax avoidance - right at the heart of the election battle, according to The Guardian. Miliband may be happy to be sued to underline the point.