The MP received a £5,000 donation from a company owned by the head of the family-owned JCB group, Anthony Bamford. In the register of MPs’ interests, Mr Swire declares the donation from JCB Research, based at Uttoxeter, Staffordshire. The company is used as a vehicle for political donations, and director Lord Bamford is one of the Tory Party’s biggest donors. It has emerged he was the sole shareholder in a company registered in the British Virgin Islands.

He dissolved the company called Casper Ltd in 2012, according to documents from the Panama law firm Mossack Fonseca seen by The Guardian, one of the media outlets studying the leaked Panama Papers. …

… There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing by Lord Bamford or Mr Swire. …

… Lord Bamford is believed to have given the Conservatives more than £4m personally and through JCB companies.

Old Etonian Mr Swire, 56, Minister of State at the Foreign Office, which comes with a salary of £98,740, also lists donations of:

£3,000 from his relative Sir Adrian Swire, a billionaire businessman and former chairman of the Swire Group, a global transport and trading conglomerate with major interests in the Far East;

£3,000 from John Lewis OBE, a director of the company Photo-Me International, of which Mr Swire was a director from June 2005 to May 2010.

The Panama Papers are a cache of 11.5 million leaked records from law firm Mossack Fonseca exposing the financial dealings of the wealthy.

Mossack Fonseca said the firm had no control of how its clients might use offshore vehicles created for them.

It is right that elected members of Parliament are transparent about their financial affairs, particularly members of the government which formulates tax law. And it is right that they are held to account through questions from the media on behalf of the electorate, and through the ballot box when the time comes.”