Epstein made $10k+ payments to Mandelson's partner around the time of the email leaks.

Mandelson says he thought the payments were bursaries from an educational foundation.

We're not allowed to say famous people are lying. But is Mandelson lying?

A 🧵 on the evidence: The offer to help came from Epstein alone. No mention of a foundation/bursary.

There's more.

On 31 March 2010, Lord Mandelson's principal private secretary sent him a note of a meeting between the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Larry Summers, US Treasury Secretary.

Lord Mandelson forwarded it to Jeffrey Epstein five minutes later.

This was a pretty detailed discussion. Epstein responded with suggestions as to how hedge funds should be taxed, and then detailed questions about the drafting of the new US rules ("may" vs "shall).

Who leaked this Number 10 discussion to Jeffrey Epstein? And are there consequences for the leaker?

It’s an internal discussion re. getting markets moving in the aftermath of the financial crisis. No doubt of great interest to Epstein and his financial market clients. The name of the leaker is redacted. Could be any of Vadera, Pond, Heywood, Mandelson, or anyone they forwarded the email to.

I guess we'll never know the leaker's identity.

New Epstein emails show Peter Mandelson secretly advising JPMorgan’s CEO on how to fight Labour’s 2009 bankers’ bonus tax - even suggesting he “mildly threaten” the Chancellor.

Mandelson was Business Secretary at the time.

A year later, he was seeking work with JPM. On 9 December 2009, Alistair Darling - then the Chancellor of the Exchequer - announced a one-off 50% tax on bankers’ bonuses.

NEW: Previously unreported Epstein emails show Peter Mandelson discussing a Panama-linked tax avoidance structure for a £750k Rio apartment - with Epstein as his "chief life adviser".

Exclusive Tax Policy Associates report: Mr Mandelson says he has no recollection of the proposal, or knowledge as to the authenticity of the documents.

He says neither he nor his husband have ever owned property in Brazil, & he has no association with any company in Panama, and holds no funds offshore.

90,000 properties in England/Wales are owned by offshore companies. Almost half unlawfully hide their true ownership

We've found them, mapped them, and published everything

▶️ This 60-second video shows how to find secretly owned property near you

📊 Details & stats below Our full report, with the interactive map, is here:

We'll be highlighting our key findings over the next week. Today, I'll summarise what we found.taxpolicy.org.uk/who-owns-brita…

The High Court has allowed Nadhim Zahawi's lawyer's appeal against the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal's finding of professional misconduct.

It’s very surprising, and concerning. Quick thread. The SDT found the lawyer, Ashley Hurst, guilty of professional misconduct because he sent me a libel threat which he claimed I couldn't publish or even refer to.

That was false. I could (and I did).

Here's a new one. An accounting firm told a tax Tribunal they would "neither confirm nor deny" if they'd used AI to prepare a taxpayer's appeal. HMRC said the appeal documents included a series of misleading summaries of caselaw. The Tribunal agreed:

There's a lot of confusion at the moment about business rates, not helped by the answer being spread across six different Budget documents.

The short version: no small business will see an increase of more than 15% next year.

The long version:

https://twitter.com/dustonlandlady/status/1993922942795960405

The history here is a mess. Business rates are based on the market rent for a property. But this is usually way out of date.

During covid, with business fallen off a cliff, business rates were on the pre-covid, high, valuations. Result: disaster.

So: emergency relief schemes.

We’ve mapped the mansion tax.

You can see who's paying - which constituency, which postcode - and how many "mansions" are near you.

Full interactive map here 👇 The map:

More info and instructions below.taxpolicy.org.uk/2025/11/27/man…

It's time to be nice about the Budget.

The council tax surcharge is a good policy. Very compromised/imperfect, but still good policy.

This is why: It's just not right that council tax is a serious tax for someone renting a modest flat, but inconsequential to someone in a £5m penthouse.

Weird that the Budget is so "back-loaded", with very few tax rises next year, and then massive effects from the threshold freeze in 2030

Why? One answer is that this is a bit of an illusion. The chart shows the very large threshold freeze effect from this Budget, but no the almost-as-large threshold freezes from previous Budgets.

Still true to say the tax rises from this Budget are back-loaded. So this is no answer.

Bad news for anyone thinking of responding to the consultation on the new electric vehicle duty.

The consultation opens today, and closes last March.
Time-travel aside, the second hand car market will become *slightly* more complicated, as you'll need to take into account whether the car you're buying has a "surplus" or "deficit" of EV duty.

Budget thread.

Basically this is it: The "fiscal creep" we've seen in the last six years has probably been the greatest tax increase from a single policy in history.

Now we get more.

These reports the Government could revalue council tax bands F, G and H don't make sense to me. Here's what could actually be going on: Here are the English council tax bands.

To work out which band your home is in, you have to play a particularly boring game of "let's pretend" in which your house and everything around it flashes back in time to 1991, and it's that pretend house that you value.

The internet is full of tax calculators. They're boring.

Tomorrow we're launching our Budget tax calculator. Prettier and nerdier than all the rest put together. Entertain yourself by seeing how much more you'll pay in various fun scenarios.

This video is brilliant.

Seems a total slam dunk that owners of private jets should pay fuel duties.

Doesn't it?

The answer is annoying. In principle this is obvious: of course there should be duty on private jet fuel . Both as a revenue raiser and (more importantly) to deter an inefficient source of CO2 emissions ("properly price an externality"). But.

Shocking article in the Sheffield Tribune. A solicitor, Andrew Milne, buying up freeholds of houses and then making (false) threats to the leaseholders to bully them into buying the freehold at a huge premium. This goes way beyond a lawyer acting unethically. If Milne knows the statements he's making are false (and it seems likely he does) then it's fraud.

Douglas Barrowman and Michelle Mone made £65m selling faulty PPE to the Government.

HMRC now wants £39m in unpaid tax — and we think we know why: Barrowman and Mone may have avoided tax on their £65m profit. During the pandemic, Douglas Barrowman's company, PPE Medpro, sold £200 million of PPE to the Government. It made £65m profit, which went into trusts benefiting Barrowman and Mone's families.

What if there was a consensus on the tax reforms the UK needs?

What if it was backed by policy experts from think tanks across the political spectrum, from the Adam Smith Institute to the Resolution Foundation?

The consensus is real. The question is: will anyone act on it? Launching today is a series of proposals backed by the Adam Smith Institute, Bright Blue, CenTax, the Centre for Policy Studies, the Institute for Public Policy Research, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the New Economics Foundation, Resolution Foundation, Tax Policy Associates.

Carter-Ruck, the UK’s most notorious libel firm, used abusive litigation to silence criticism of a former Tory donor.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority is investigating - but Carter-Ruck just filed a judicial review. If successful, they'll have total impunity.

Thread: The donor is Mohamed Amersi.

Former Tory MP @CharlotteLeslie wrote a private note on Amersi's activities. As @DavidDavisMP said, Amersi then "used his wealth and influence to try to bully Charlotte Leslie into silence".