Rich Tory donor embroiled in ‘tax avoidance’ storm hands Harriett Baldwin £2,000 in re-election bid

A BRITISH philanthropist at the centre of a national tax avoidance storm has donated £2,000 towards a Worcestershire MP’s bid for re-election, it has emerged.

Lord Fink, a multi-millionaire former hedge fund manager embroiled in a row Ed Miliband, has handed the cash to West Worcestershire Conservative Harriett Baldwin.

The outspoken Tory donor, who is worth £180 million, threatened to sue Mr Miliband in February after the Labour leader used parliamentary privilege to condemn “the tax avoidance activities of Lord Fink”.

Your Worcester News can reveal how the peer, who has openly admitted tax avoidance, going as far as saying “everyone does it”, is a personal friend of Mrs Baldwin.

There are no suggestions of any wrongdoing as the cash has been declared properly, with Lord Fink’s donation registered back in January.

But the acceptance of the money has been criticised by her immediate Labour Party rival, West Worcestershire parliamentary candidate Daniel Walton.

“I’ve been inundated with emails from the public for some time who want my views on tax avoidance,” he said.

“These people have an influence on the political system and they don’t do it out of the goodness of their heart.

“Very soon we’ll see lots of Harriett Baldwin boards go up around the constituency, it’s this £2,000 which is helping towards that and it’s come from someone who has avoided paying tax.”

Mrs Baldwin, who is a former managing director at huge US investment bank JP Morgan Chase, described Lord Fink as a “generous” philanthropist today.

She also said the cash was handed over last year.

“I am proud to call the generous philanthropists Stanley and Barbara Fink friends and am honoured that they supported my re-election campaign with a £2,000 donation last year,” she said.

“This was fully and publicly declared many months ago.”

During a Prime Minister’s Questions debate in February Mr Miliband accused David Cameron of being in hock to donors, attacking Lord Fink by name.

Lord Fink is a former Conservative treasurer and said he would sue him if he repeated his criticism outside the protection of the Commons, where remarks cannot lead to legal action.

He later said “the expression tax avoidance is so wide, that everyone does tax avoidance at some level,” saying he would not sue the Labour leader, mainly because ‘avoidance’ does not imply any illegal tax evasion.

Lord Fink also said he did take “vanilla” tax avoidance measures, including transferring shares into family trusts while he worked in Switzerland, insisting he could have adopted far more aggressive tax avoidance measures but chose not to.