LABOUR taunted tight-lipped Tory Chancellor George Osborne yesterday following his “week of silence” over the HSBC tax-dodge scandal.

The Conservative frontbencher has rarely been seen or heard from in the past week, even though his turn at a G20 summit in Istanbul finished last Tuesday.

Shadow Treasury chief secretary Chris Leslie branded Mr Osborne the “submarine Chancellor” for failing to surface despite the storm surrounding collusion between tax-avoiding British millionaires and HSBC’s Swiss wing.

He “still hasn’t surfaced,” observed Mr Leslie yesterday.

“But it is time he and David Cameron finally started answering questions about HSBC and Lord Green.”

Senior Tories have preferred so far to duck the issue, refusing to appear in public. Instead, tax-avoiding billionaires at the head of the Telegraph and Daily Mail media empires have been on the offensive following a bruising week for the Conservatives.

Mr Osborne and Mr Cameron were last spotted together in the Midlands a day after Labour leader Ed Miliband tore into the Tories for their “dodgy donors.”

Since then the Prime Minister has been at EU talks while the Chancellor has disappeared from public view.

Mr Leslie repeated the concerns raised by Labour over the case — just one prosecution by HMRC despite a 1,100-strong list of known dodgers, a deal with the Swiss in 2012 that blocks the release of similar information — and questioned the extent of the pair’s knowledge of the HSBC scandal when the bank’s ex-chief Stephen Green was appointed a peer and trade minister.