After your name appeared last week on a list of people who may have benefited from an HSBC Suisse banking scheme to help the very wealthy avoid or evade tax, you issued a statement to this newspaper denying that you had ever owned a Swiss bank account, but describing yourself as “the beneficiary of a trust administered by a family office in Geneva”.

I have received a large amount of correspondence from residents since the HSBC scandal broke, asking my opinion on how we prevent the ultra-wealthy playing by a different set of rules on tax to the rest of us.

Not one of those letters was concerned with who owns what bank account.

What matters to people is who the beneficiaries are of long-standing financial arrangements that involve moral choices about tax.

In short, Mr Goldsmith, your constituents deserve to know what choices you made.

In your statement, you talked of “inheriting” your non-dom tax status – meaning you were registered as if a foreign national for tax purposes – from your father, Sir James Goldsmith.

This was a curious choice of words. Non-dom status is not like inheriting a piece of your family silver. You inherited the eligibility to choose.

And let us be clear – the choice to register as a nondom was yours.

You are yet to answer straight-forward questions about this, including how much UK tax you saved as a result of this arrangement, over how many years, and when it was that you chose to start being a British taxpayer.

The residents of the Richmond Park constituency deserve the full and open answers to these questions and they deserve them before the general election in May.

ROBIN MELTZER
Liberal Democrat Parliamentary candidate, Richmond Park and North Kingston