Cameron's tax returns reveal tax-free gifts from family

LONDON, April 10 (UPI) -- British Prime Minister David Cameron's tax returns, released Sunday, indicate he received $320,000 in tax-free payments from his mother in 2011.

Cameron took the unusual step of publicly opening his tax records for the past six years to neutralize controversy after claims he profited from his late father's offshore funds. His father, a millionaire stockbroker, died in 2010 but his name surfaced recently in the disclosure of the Panama Papers, 11 million illegally-revealed documents listing offshore accounts of global politicians and celebrities. The leaked documents came from the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca.

The three-page summary of Cameron's accounts indicates he earned nearly 1.1 million pounds ($1.554 million) and paid about 400,000 pounds ($565,100) in income tax in the past six years. Of particular interest are payments his mother, Mary Cameron, made to her son in 2011. According to British tax law, they are tax-free if she survives seven years after the gift was made. The prime minister's office said the gift was an attempt to "balance" the division of father Ian Cameron's estate after his death.

The documents also indicated that in 2010, before he became prime minister, Cameron sold his shares in his father's offshore account, receiving 19,000 pounds ($26,844).

The release of the information came the day after protesters in London, convening near a spring conference of Cameron's Conservative Party, demanded Cameron's resignation. Protesters and opposition leaders called on him to "close tax loopholes or resign." Although Cameron admitted Thursday he benefitted from his father's offshore fund, his statement failed to stop demands that he release information about the transactions.

"I want to see the papers," Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said Saturday in a television interview. "We need to know what he's actually returned as a tax return. We need to know why he put this money overseas in the first place, and whether he made anything out of it or not before 2010 when he became prime minister. These are questions that he must answer."