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The recently-elected deputy leader of Reform UK has come under fire for having "squirrelled away" shares worth millions in a Jersey trust for decades – and then campaigning while chair of the right-wing party to “stop the offshore taxpayer ripoff”.
In July’s UK election, Richard Tice MP overturned a 25,000 Conservative majority to win the seat of Boston and Skegness, a constituency in Lincolnshire.
But before he claimed his spot in Parliament, and before he spearheaded the party's anti-offshore tax pledge in their manifesto, the grandson of property developer Bernard Sunley had his trust fund registered at a Jersey address for decades.
Mr Tice, from Surrey, started to amass his own property empire in his mid-20s and set up the 'RJS Tice Family Settlement' in Jersey while he was resident in Paris. It was registered at Paragon House, 95-97 Halkett Place, St Helier.
However, despite moving back to the UK in 1991, he did not relocate the trust from Jersey to the UK until several years ago, his financial records show.
Mr Tice, speaking to The Mirror, which broke the story alongside the Good Law Project, said he had set up the trust to avoid being "double-taxed" on his "international investments".
And as late as 2016, he transferred £1 million of his shares from his commercial property company, Quidnet Reit Limited, whose accounts are available online, into the trust.
Quidnet owns £32 million of commercial property in the UK and the trust now owns a 17% stake which is worth around £3 million.
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Mr Tice said the beneficiaries of the trust were his three children with his ex-wife and insisted they are all UK taxpayers, like him. The trust was listed by Tice's company Quidnet as having an address in Jersey as recently as July 2021.
But Mr Tice said that this was just a "correspondence address" and that he had already brought the trust to the UK.
The financial statements of Mr Tice also show that Gellymill Limited, with the same Jersey office address as the trust and linked to him, lent £125,000 to Quidnet in 2022. Mr Tice has said he was not a director of Gellymill but it was under his control.
As a newly-elected member of Parliament, he is required to declare details of his financial interests. It is important to note that tax avoidance, unlike tax evasion, is legal.
Mr Tice was the leader of Reform UK from 2021 until June 2024, when he was replaced by current leader Nigel Farage.
After campaigning with Leave EU and the Brexit Party, he was elected as a Member of the European Parliament in 2019.
Reform UK's manifesto, which was released under Mr Tice's party chairmanship, promised to "stop the offshore taxpayer ripoff".
Under the topic of 'Pensions and Social Care', the manifesto states: "Some larger care home providers are avoiding tax on hundreds of millions of profits through complex offshore property company structures and high interest shareholder loans. This has to end."
The Good Law Project, which is a non-profit campaign organisation which "uses the law for a better world", suggested that it was hypocritical for Mr Tice to have said his party would "take back control" of UK taxpayers' cash.
“If you really love your country you pay your taxes,” Executive Director Jo Maugham commented. “You want young people to be well educated and older people to be cared for. You want a decent police force and your armed forces veterans looked after. You don’t have a family trust in a tax haven.”
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