 Jacob Rees-Mogg may have breached parliamentary rules by not declaring six million pounds in personal loans from his Cayman Island-linked company. That's all according to the Mail on Sunday, who this weekend detailed how Rees-Mogg borrowed up to £2.94 million a year in directors' loans from his firm Saliston Limited. The loans, which were granted between 2018 and 2020, weren't declared in Rees-Mogg's register of interests. Rees-Mogg maintains he was not required to declare the loans, as they didn't represent any outside income. They were just loans. But the Mail on Sunday suggests his argument might not stack up. Although it does not explicitly cover directors' loans, the MP's Code of Conduct requires directors to declare taxable expenses, allowances and benefits. In the MP's register of interest, Mr Rees-Mogg disclosed himself as an unremunerated director and shareholder of the firm, but did not say he had taken out the loans. By using directors' loans, classed by the government as a taxable benefit, he was able to borrow the large sum at very low interest rates. A source in the Commons sleaze watchdogs that the loans should absolutely have been declared in the register of interests, adding, the whole point of registration is the public should be able to know what is governing your decision-making and the actions you take. The nub of the story here, Rees-Mogg managed to borrow these loans from the company, which he used to purchase a house at a lower interest rate than one would have been able to get on the market. He got it for essentially 0.8%. That's what it all worked out as it was, in other words, a benefit, and it was a benefit that went undeclared. Ash, Rees-Mogg is the first cabinet member to be properly caught up in the fallout from the Owen Patterson affair. I suppose we should say other than Boris Johnson. Could this be significant? It could be, particularly if Catherine Stone, after quasi-quarting, sent for her and missed, is feeling like she wants to pay particular attention to Boris Johnson and his front benches as a show of her strength and independence. This could be something which lands him in trouble, even though he insists that because of this loophole, everything that he did was above board. I think the story has got a lot of shades of the Peter Mandelson scandal in 1998, where he was shamed into resigning because of an undeclared loan from an associate of, I think it was around £370,000, which allowed him to buy a very swanky house in Notting Hill. A little bit of trivia. Do you know who it was who helped break that story? I don't, go on. Enlighten me. Seamus Milne. Oh, was it? It was. So there might be some beef of longstanding there. But my point is that this kind of has shades of that particular scandal. It's just whether the fact that there is this loophole, whether that's enough to insulate him from either a kind of critical mass of public outcry or indeed an investigation by the Standards Committee and Commissioner Catherine Stone. The firm which made the loan was Saliston Limited. It had Riesmog as its director until he joined the cabinet in 2019. Riesmog still retains 100% shareholding in it and his wife remains a director. He said, I've stepped back because I'm joining the cabinet, but my wife's still a director and I still own the whole thing. So of that company, The Mail Report, Saliston Limited has previously been described as a holding company by Mr Riesmog. It has 8 million pounds in property assets, understood to include a Mayfair house and nearly 1 million pounds in other investments. In 2018, it took out a 2.87 million bank loan, according to its accounts, the same year it lent Mr Riesmog 2.9 million. It has a controlling stake in Somerset Capital Management, LLP, the parent firm of Somerset Capital Management, limited in the Cayman Islands. On that Cayman's question, which is, I presume, of particular interest to many people, Jacob Riesmog said, I have no managerial responsibility for Somerset Capital Management. However, I know the Cayman company purely provides a fund for non-UK investors, but any and all money it makes returns to Somerset Capital Management in the UK where it pays full taxes. One might ask, why do non-UK citizens need to invest via the Cayman Islands? He said, Oh, it's not me that invest. That's for non-UK citizens. But who are these non-UK citizens? Why do they want to invest via a country which is infamously secretive and is willing to hide your identity? It makes it seem like you might have some unsavory clients. Obviously, I don't know. But these events raise questions, don't they? Ash, what do you think it says about our political class that cabinet members think it's perfectly acceptable to have holding companies with branches in the Cayman Islands? I think that it shows that an awful lot of this Brexit populism, where you have people like Jacob Riesmog or indeed Boris Johnson or former Brexit Party chairman Richard Tice reinventing themselves as these tribunes of the people, real Vox populi, all the while concealing the fact that they are making use of business and tax arrangements which are only available to the very, very wealthy. Part of this is that it's deliberately confusing and opaque. Even in reading out that story, Michael, you've got a distinguish between the parent company and this other company which is in the Cayman Islands, how the returns might be working, how this loan which is taken out by the company then happens simultaneously with another loan going to Jacob Riesmog. If you're somebody who is unfamiliar with the tax arrangements of multinational corporations or high net worth individuals who are able to invest across borders, it's really confusing and you almost don't know what's wrong with it because it's so opaque. But ultimately, what this is is using the fact that there is a two-tier system of justice, particularly when it comes to tax, where if you're an ordinary worker, your taxes will be subject to scrutiny by HMRC. You can, of course, be audited. You can be sanctioned. You can be fined even if you make a mistake or simply you didn't know some of the rules. Whereas if you're somebody who has a team of financial advisors, lawyers, accountants, you're able to exploit these loopholes and arrange your money in a way which is fundamentally unfair and means that tax is disproportionately paid in these low tax jurisdictions. And also, your finances are kept in jurisdictions where there's an awful lot of secrecy and opacity surrounding banking. As a way of ducking your democratic and your financial obligations to the state, I think it's dreadful that ministers are able to exploit it. But Jacob Riesmog is not the first and I'm sure that without a change of the rules, he won't be the last. This is what the rules are designed to facilitate. So we kind of, I think, do a disservice to the story by framing it in terms of loopholes. I know that's the word I've been using a lot. They're not really loopholes so much as gates, right? Kind of come hither holes in the wall which should exist between politicians and corruption.