Did #Hammond take a directorship with a false DOB and not declare it?

(Note: the information in this article raises concerns over apparent discrepancies between Companies House records and the Chancellor’s parliamentary declarations. If you have further information or insights pertaining to the subject of this article, please indicate this to the author via the comments and I will contact you for details.)

Philip Hammond’s refusal to reveal his tax affairs – despite the fact that Labour’s leader and Shadow Chancellor and even the Prime Minister disclosed theirs – has raised serious questions about what he’s so keen to hide.

Now the SKWAWKBOX has uncovered some troubling information about Chancellor’s history that raises further concerns and may suggest that the Chancellor took steps to avoid disclosing at least one directorship that should have been added to his parliamentary “register of members’ interests” (RoMI).

As his Companies House (CH) entry reveals, Hammond has been a director of 19 companies, although none of them are current.

But there is one curious CH entry that stands separately from the 19 – and has not appeared in the RoMI.

Philip Hammond was born in December 1955 and his 19 companies are against a Companies House (CH) record with that date of birth. But there is ‘another‘ Philip Hammond entry at CH with a different date of birth – October 1948 – and only one directorship record. Here is that entry:

But how do we know it’s that Philip Hammond? After all, there are a number of Hammonds on CH with directorships, with various dates of birth and addresses. Here’s what suggests that the two are the same individual:

1. Among the companies that Hammond has declared in his CH directorships is another company with exactly the same address in Wales as the entry against the 1948 Hammond:
   
   
2. Hammond’s wife, Susan Carolyn Hammond (née Walker-Williams) also has a number of entries on CH – including one with the company that shares an address with 1948 Hammond’s entry.
3. Mrs Hammond also has a second old directorship with a different company – and for that directorship she used the same address – 47 Romney Street in London – that ‘1948 Hammond’ used on his entry:
   
4. Hammond himself has also used the 47 Romney Street address for another of the 19 company directorships on his CH record – one which he held around the same time as the 1948 Hammond’s and resigned just a few months after 1948 resigned his.

Unless  the Chancellor has an impersonator, or a brother born 7 years earlier and also called Philip, who followed him around his addresses and registered directorships without Hammond’s knowledge, it seems clear that the ‘two’ are one and the same.

The use of an incorrect birth date has the effect of making it a separate entry on the CH records which would not be found in a search for the correct December 1955 birth date.

The use of a birth year that is seven years older would mean that a searcher would not easily onnect the two records, especially if using the ‘+/- 5 years‘ search condition that is common on many searchable sites.

It is of course possible that the 1948 date of birth is just an admin error, although it’s not easy to imagine how someone could put down the wrong month and year of birth by accident.

But when you consider  the fact that this incorrect date of birth is on a directorship that appears never to have been mentioned by Mr Hammond in the RoMI, it starts to look like something at least worthy of thorough investigation.

Hammond’s 1948 entry shows that the directorship was held for only three months:

Updates to the RoMI are not made every day, but rather periodically, every few months. Given such a short period, could Hammond simply have become a director and then resigned between updates, so that he would have had no ‘interest’ to declare?

It appears not. The RoMI master list shows the updates around that period and clicking on the entry for the 2004-5 period shows 3 updates:

Two of those updates took place during the period of Mr Hammond’s apparent directorship under the 1948 entry – but they contain no mention of the company of which ‘1948′ was a director.

Could he have declared it but it didn’t make it onto either of those updates? The one remaining update in that period was in April 2005. In that, Mr Hammond does make one declaration dating back to February of that year – but it is not for a directorship:

The next update on record is for December 2005, 10 months after the directorship ended. No mention is made of the directorship in question there, either.

The SKWAWKBOX does not have the resources to run down every possible loose end in this matter. It’s possible that there is some legitimate explanation for this apparent anomaly between Mr Hammond’s apparent activities and his mandatory declaration of them.

This blog urges the mainstream media to look into the matter to answer the question definitively. Because if the apparent problem is confirmed, this nation’s finances are in the hands of a man who appears to want to keep more than his tax return out of the public record.

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