Meet the tax expert who solved the Nadhim Zahawi puzzle
Dan Neidle - a former partner at city legal firm Clifford Chance - reflects on his role in solving the puzzle of ex-Tory chair Nadhim Zahawi's tax affairs
Lee Harpin is the Jewish News's political editor
The tax expert who played a leading role in the downfall of ex-Conservative chairman and chancellor Nadhim Zahawi is reflecting on his Jewish upbringing in the “glamorous” streets of Watford.
Since his barmitzvah at Radlett and Bushey reform synagogue, Dan Neidle, now 49, admits, simchas aside, he “hasn’t been back much since” and has never been “a big shul goer.” That’s not to say neither, he, or his wife, who now live in Norfolk, aren’t both proudly Jewish.
“We both feel very Jewish,” he says. “But we are both non-observant, and not shy about saying so.”
Neidle moved out to the Norfok countryside when he stepped back from his work as a partner at top city law firm Clifford Chance last year, after 23 years, to spend more time with his family.
As a part-time venture he set up Tax Policy Associates Ltd with the aim of providing “expert and impartial” tax policy advice. It was last June, after a conversation with Financial Times journalist Jim Pickard, that Neidle says he first came to look into the business affairs of Tory minister Zahawi.
A freedom of information request by the journalist to HM Revenue & Customs led to them wrongly stating last June that no ministers were under investigation by the tax authority.
Meanwhile a report in the Independentnewspaper just days later revealed Zahawi’s finances had in fact been the subject of a probe at the National Crime Agency, which did not lead to any action being taken.
“You could smell there was something odd,” Neidle says.
The former Watford Boys school pupil – “when it was a comprehensive” – accepts it would be a bit cliched to say the desire to stop injustice was the Jewish value that drove him on with his research and his general fascination with taxation systems.
In the past, other Jewish experts have attempted to draw a comparison with studying tax law and the Talmud.
“Talmudic studies may or may not be a useful way for people to spend their time, but I’m not sure they should be a model for our tax system,” laughs Neidle. “It’s solving puzzles and the tax code is just like one big puzzle,” he adds.
As the pressure mounted on Zahawi, before his sacking last Sunday by Rishi Sunak, some claimed Neidle, a long-time Labour and Jewish Labour Movement member was acting in a partisan, political way with his continued probe into the former chancellor’s affairs. But it’s a charge he firmly rejects. “I’m just not a very partisan person,” he says.
“My belief is that you have tax policy that is sensible, closes loopholes and applies in a way that is fair. That can be agreed on by left and by right. The size of the state and re-distrubution are other questions. The key question over how tax policy will work is not partisan. I really don’t have difficulty separating that.”
And Neidle notes he has come under attack from the left before, after he came out with statistics that suggested the cost of nationalisation proposed by former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn ahead of the 2019 election didn’t add up.
“The 2019 election, the Labour Party hated me,” he recalls. “The stuff I said about the nationalisation policies, they briefed I was the Tory Party’s favourite lawyer.”
He laughs again before recalling:”A couple of years ago the Tory financial secretary to the treasury said I was excellent. They love me!”
Neidle, now an elected member of Labour’s national constitutional committee (NCC), also references the influence on him his grandparents had as the “grew up in extreme poverty in the the East End.”
Like many Jews of that era, his grandmother was a communist. “There was a burning hatred of injustice and a desire to do something about it,” he says.
But unfortunately there was also the other side. “She stayed a communist well after it was clear to any objective observer that Stalin was a brutal mass murderer,” recalls Neidle.
“I learnt something valuable about extremism, and how your hatred of injustice can sometimes lure you unwittingly into political extremism.”
Bizarrely, at Bristol University, Neidle had initially thought his future career prospects were best served in the subject of physics “partly because there were so many brilliant Jewish” experts in the field.
He also joined the J-Soc at Bristol and once went to NUS conference …”god help me.”
He said he particularly idolised the American physicist Richard Feynman. But after recognising he wasn’t “actually good enough at physics” to progress too far, Neidle switched to believing he could become a “crusading criminal barrister” before he then realised he could not handle the emotional aspect of the job.
His big break came when he applied to law firms, and won a debating contest at Clifford Chance.
Neidle says he can’t recall the topic of the debate, but does remember the journalist and former MP Matthew Parris was one of the judges.
He admits that when he first started at Clifford Chance, he suffered from “imposters syndrome” and felt like he didn’t belong in such an esteemed establishment. But that changed after a couple of years once he developed his love of taxation affairs.
“I think the UK tax system comes across pretty well,” he says. “The vast majority of people don’t ever have to fill in a tax return, which is way better than the US system.
“The problems we tend to have with the tax system tend to be through political choices.”
At one stage during his probe into Zahawi, Neidle admits he found himself under considerable stress as a result of the legal threats he faced from the politician’s legal firm Osborne Clarke.
Zahawi’s lawyers demanded he retracted his allegation of “dishonesty” but unfettered he published the libel letters he was sent and continued to allege a lack of transparency in a series of post.
Neidle discussed the situation with his own lawyers, and his wife. “We thought we shouldnt drop it,” he recalls.
“But if it did come to court and we won we could still be out of pocket by hundreds of thousands of pounds.
“If we lost it would be millions. I had no newspaper behind me. That was easier than being a journalist because I had no one to tell me to stop.But the buck would always stop with my family.”
It subsequently emerged that Zahawi had indeed paid back millions to HMRC, which vindicated Neidle, and the other journalists who continued to dig into the story.
Neidle has now referred Zahawi’s lawyer to the solicitors regulation authority, claiming they misled him.
He also now plans to spend more time with his wife and family again, as was the original plan when he moved to the countryside.
Just don’t expect to see him in shul any time soon.
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