In his speech to Scottish Labour this morning Ed Miliband has just attacked tax avoidance by hedge funds. It is a regular theme, he was attacking the Tories as “the party of Mayfair hedge funds” at PMQs last month only for it to be revealed last week that one of Labour’s biggest donors after the unions was in fact a Mayfair based hedge fund trader. Martin Taylor has given a whopping £600,000. Ed’s embarrassment will have increased even more after Guido revealed in The Sun yesterday that his bitter 2010 Labour Party leadership campaign was funded by Lawrence Staden, another Mayfair based hedge fund trader. After the unions Staden was the biggest funder of Ed Miliband’s campaign to take control of the Labour Party…

Ed, desperate to beat his brother David, quietly took £27,000 from GLC, a billion dollar Mayfair hedge fund run by the Cambridge educated maths genius Lawrence Staden. Staden also gave another £100,000 of his profits to the Labour Party – £80,000 to Labour HQ, £10,000 to the ultra-marginal Eltham Labour Party and another £10,000 to neighbouring Greenwich and Woolwich, the constituency which includes his £3 million home in affluent Blackheath. Small change to a man who paid himself £3 million in the same year.

Staden’s hedge fund’s profits meant he could well afford it, having personally made an estimated £35 million from trading during the credit crunch, even boasting of ‘sailing serenely’ through the economic crisis that so devastated the British economy. He jokingly referred to the period leading up to 2008 banking collapse which saw many of his rival arbitrageurs go bust as “arbageddon”. 

In parliament, during a heated PMQs, Ed Miliband accused David Cameron of failing to tackle tax avoidance “for the simple reason that too many of his friends would get caught in the net. They’re the party of Mayfair hedge funds and Monaco tax avoiders.” So it will add to Ed Miliband’s embarrassment that his friend and backer Lawrence Staden’s hedge fund, GLC Diversified Fund, was registered in the offshore tax haven of Bermuda where income tax is not levied on hedge fund profits, allowing his fund to accumulate millions offshore without paying a penny in tax. Maybe Ed will unfriend his financial backer?

Coming on top of the revelations last week about Martin Taylor donating £600,000, many traditional Labour supporters will be feeling increasingly uneasy that the money might come with strings or appear to compromise their policies. Labour has just launched hard-hitting scaremongering billboard posters warning against the privatisation of the NHS. Supporters will be astonished and disgusted to learn that Martin Taylor’s Nevsky Capital fund has $15 million invested in the shares of the US private healthcare giant United Health, which is bidding for NHS contracts…