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Finance (No. 2) Bill

I remind the Committee of my entry in the Register of Members’ Interests. I am a settlor of a trust, which I set up for my children with assets that I generated from my own endeavours—in other words, they were not inherited by me prior to my becoming a Member of the House. I am also the beneficiary of a trust and should like to explain why it was set up. My father set it up in order to gift some assets to me, as a result of my asking a question to his adviser about whether I would be able to borrow against those assets for my other activities. So concerned was my father when he heard that he could be making me a gift that I might then seek to leverage on receipt that he put the assets into a trust, precisely in order to protect them. He was not prepared to allow me, even though I was over 25, to use those assets for a purpose other than he had intended.