TORY leadership hopeful David Davis has branded Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown "a robber" for his tax policies.

The man battling David Cameron to succeed Folkestone and Hythe MP Michael Howard as party leader accused Mr Brown and the Government of wrecking the pension system, damaging savings and increasing business regulation.

The Government was masquerading as the friend of business, Mr Davis said.

"They masquerade as the party of business but I have to tell you that Gordon Brown is like one of those financial directors in the 1960s, in the days of creative accounting when everything was off balance sheet.

"This man learned his trade at Geoffrey Robinson. They all wore blue suits and spoke in gravelly voices. To put this man up as a friend of business . . . he’s a robber."

It was absolute nonsense for Mr Brown to blame oil prices for halving his forecast economic growth rate, Mr Davis said.

"The simple truth is that the biggest component of the reduction in growth is a combination of tax and regulatory burden together. We’ve got to reverse that. If we don’t, we’ll be in real trouble in dealing with China and India and international, competition generally."

Mr Davis, 56, is a graduate of London Business School and a former director of Tate & Lyle. He also attended the Advance Management Program at Harvard.

He was speaking at the Kent Messenger Group’s headquarters in Larkfield on the same day that the CBI claimed that, since 1997, UK companies and investors had paid an extra £50 billion in taxation as a result of Budget decisions.

In its pre-Budget submission, the employers’ organisation called for these increases to be put into reverse with a cut in the general business tax burden before 2010.

Mr Davis, a former member of the CBI’s financial policy committee, shared these concerns and repeated his commitment to lower taxes.

"The business community understands that low tax rates mean high growth rates, high growth rates mean high tax revenues, high tax revenues mean you can cut tax rates again and increase spending."

He accused the Government of allowing business red tape to grow out of control.

"We’ve got China and India coming over the horizon after our markets and we’re adding about the price of three Chinese employees to every job. It’s just ridiculous."

But Mr Davis admitted that the Tories, once the natural party for business, had to recover ground lost to New Labour.

It would be important for him to convince the City that they were the friend of business. If he won the election, he would spend time on the "prawn cocktail" circuit, he said.