Mandelson under fire over home. again
By Ian Dunt
Business secretary Lord Mandelson is refusing to answer questions over his £2.5 million home near Regents Park today, in a growing row with echoes of his first resignation a decade ago.
The current controversy centred on the discrepancy between how much money Lord Mandelson managed to raise and the cost of the villa.
“It was ever thus that some of these newspapers want to stir up this sort of problem. I’m afraid I have a day job and I’m going to concentrate on that,” he told Sky News.
Lord Mandelson lost his first Cabinet post ten years ago when it transpired he had failed to declare a £373,000 loan in a mortgage application for his £475,000 home in Notting Hill.
The Evening Standard is quoting a shortfall of between £250,000 and £400,000 in what he needed for the current property.
The £2.4 million price of the house is almost 16 times his income.
Lord Mandelson is understood to have purchased the property through selling off shares on an advertising agency and a substantial legacy left to him by him when his mother died.
But records from Companies House show the shares were sold in June 2007, a year after Mandelson bought the home.
