Labour destroyed documents that could have revealed where Angela Rayner claimed to be living when she applied to be a parliamentary candidate.
Ms Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, is being investigated by police over claims that she broke electoral law by registering the wrong address as her permanent residence on the electoral register between 2010 and 2015.
She was registered at her own house in Vicarage Road, Stockport, for those five years, while her husband at the time lived about a mile away at a house in Lowndes Lane. They married in 2010.
Neighbours have claimed that she actually lived at Lowndes Lane and that her brother was living in the Vicarage Road property.
Labour has previously said it would not reveal which address she included on internal selection papers in 2014. Now it has emerged that the papers have been “disposed of”, which a Labour spokesman said was carried out in line with data protection laws.
Police are investigating multiple allegations against Ms Rayner, with at least a dozen officers assigned to the case. Detectives are also considering whether a single person’s discount on council tax was wrongly claimed at one of the properties.
The Labour deputy leader is facing scrutiny over whether she or her husband paid the right amount of capital gains tax (CGT) when two properties they owned simultaneously during their marriage were sold.
The Telegraph previously requested the selection papers from when she applied to become the Labour candidate for Ashton-under-Lyne, the year before the election, which would have included her main address.
Labour refused, but on Thursday a party spokesman said: “The document is no longer held and had been disposed of, in line with legal data protection requirements.”
If Ms Rayner had listed her husband’s address on Lowndes Lane on the papers, it would cast fresh doubts on her claim she was living in her own home on Vicarage Road.
The question of where she was living is crucial to a number of claims, one being an allegation of electoral fraud. Providing a false address on the electoral roll is an offence under the Representation of the People Act 1983. Ms Rayner is listed on the roll as living at Vicarage Road.
It could also determine whether Ms Rayner was liable to pay capital gains tax on her property when she sold it for £127,500 in March 2015.
If it was her primary address, where she lived the majority of the time, she would have been exempt from capital gains tax on the sale.
If, as has been claimed by neighbours, she was in fact living with her husband on Lowndes Lane, she may not have been entitled to the exemption and could potentially owe tax of up to £3,500.
Private residence relief allows for an exemption from capital gains tax when you are selling your primary residence. Married couples who are not separated are only able to claim the relief on one property and can nominate which one.
If it transpires that Ms Rayner did claim private residence relief on the sale of her property, it would mean her husband would not have been eligible to do the same when he sold his property in 2016.
Police and Stockport council are also reviewing whether Ms Rayner claimed a single person’s council tax discount on her Vicarage Road home while allowing her brother to live there.
Stephen Watson, the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, has promised to “get to the bottom of what happened”.
In a statement last Friday, Ms Rayner said she was “completely confident” that she had followed the rules at all times but said she would resign if she was found to have committed a criminal offence.
“I will say, as I did before, if I committed a criminal offence I would of course do the right thing and step down,” she said.
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