A multi-millionairess like all the Tory elite, Amber Rudd truly is every bit as horrible as the persona she exhibited on the BBC Leaders’ Debate this evening. A former banker with J P Morgan, she was also a director of two offshore tax avoidance asset management firms in the Bahamas. She never declared this and the information came out in a leak.
The refined journalists of the Financial Times are of course much more her choice for public engagement than having to stoop to discuss policy in front of the great unwashed, for whom she has a profound contempt. This is what she thinks of her constituents in Hastings:
“You get people who are on benefits, who prefer to be on benefits by the seaside. They’re not moving down here to get a job, they’re moving down here to have easier access to friends and drugs and drink.”
So why did she go to Hastings to represent such awful plebs? She explained that to her friends at the Financial Times as well:
“I wanted to be within two hours of London and I could see we were going to win it.”
According to the normally reliable CompanyCheck, as an MP Amber Rudd has constituted herself as a company, presumably for purposes of tax avoidance. That would of course give her a personal interest in low levels of corporation tax. But strangely Companies House itself has no company with the registration number given by CompanyCheck.
What Company House does have, however, are the records of Monticello PLC, a short lived company of which Rudd was a Director. It attracted many hundreds of investors who put money in, despite never appearing actually to do anything except pay its directors – presumably including Rudd. Trawling through its documents at Companies House, I find it difficult to conclude that it was ever anything other than a share ramping scheme designed to rip off its investors. After just over a year of existence it went bankrupt with over £1.2 million of debts and no important assets. I should be very interested if anybody can go through those records and come up with any different conclusion to mine.
Interestingly Amber Rudd’s father Tony, who died this week, had been debarred as a company director after being found to have asset stripped another investor vehicle, Greenbank Trust, and misused its assets to personal benefit. As with Emma Barnett, we again come across a wealthy Tory whose privileged upbringing was financed by the criminal behaviour of the wealthy.
It is a bit of a stretch to imagine that, nationally, Labour will get the 4.7% swing that would be needed to oust Rudd from Hastings. But perhaps it is not too much to hope that there may be a local revolt from the people she despises.