“I was wrong” for flipping my house, says Labour ex-minister – Media roundup: June 20th, 2013

A Labour minister who resigned in the wake of the expenses scandal has finally conceded she was wrong to avoid paying thousands in tax on the sale of her home. Kitty Ussher, who was a Treasury minister in Gordon Brown’s Government, resigned in 2009 after “flipping” her main home to avoid paying capital gains tax. Despite her decision to stand down, she wrote in her resignation letter that she “did not do anything wrong”. But four years to the day after her fall, she made the rare move of conceding she had been at fault. “At the time I said I had done nothing wrong — after all it wasn’t unlawful,” she wrote. “But actually that’s not the point — it was still wrong, but for other reasons. “Public servants should always be at pains to ensure that they are not only compliant with the letter of the law but also with the spirit of it, and I did not focus on that. It was my mistake — and I paid the price for it.” – The Times(£)

A top businessman who threw his weight behind the Government’s savage cuts is to be made an unelected minister and handed a peerage. BT boss Ian Livingston was named by David Cameron as the ­Coalition’s new trade minister yesterday. It was confirmed that he will be made a Lord to get round the fact that he hasn’t been elected to Parliament. Mr Livingston, who will step down from BT, has been a high-profile supporter of Government’s austerity drive. In 2010, he was one of 35 leading business figures to sign a letter urging Chancellor George Osborne to press ahead with his deficit-reducing plans. He replaces Lord Green, a former HSBC chief executive and chairman, as Government trade minister. – Mirror