Tories aren’t against tax dodging, they’re in favour of it – just don’t get caught – Michael Meacher MP

Last Updated: February 17, 2015By

Osborne’s studied silence over this last week speaks volumes, writes Michael Meacher.

If the issue were anything else but tax evasion and avoidance, he would be seeking to find an angle to turn it against Labour for all he’s worth. But on tax avoidance he’s skewered.

It was on his watch that no action was taken when news first leaked out in 2010 about massive tax evasion by the British super-rich at the British HSBC bank in Geneva.

Indeed the wrongdoing was deliberately kept secret in government circles for five years, and only surfaced when a whistleblower blew it.

On his watch the same HSBC bank, the ‘highly suspect British company’ as the US authorities nicknamed it for its polluted culture, was heavily fined in 2012 in the US for money-laundering for drug cartels and pariah states, but no action was taken in the UK.

This is not an isolated case: it fits a pattern of studied inaction. In the last five years HMRC tax inspector staff have been cut back by nearly 40%, even though the evidence indicates that for every £1 spent in 2013-4 by the unit dealing with the UK’s largest and most complex cases an additional £97 was recovered.

The Serious Fraud Office has seen its budget cut to a mere £35m which can only be explained as a deliberate (and successful) effort to make it incapable of taking on banks and their big law and accountancy accomplices.

Even now, despite HMRC trumpeting in 2011 that all 6,000 British-held accounts in the HSBC files were ‘ripe for investigation’, it has collected just £135m in tax, interest and penalties – less than 1% of the estimated total in the accounts and far less than France, Belgium and Spain have collected from a smaller number of their citizens’ accounts.

With the Tories it’s all mouth and wind.

Read the full article on Michael Meacher’s blog.

Follow me on Twitter: @MidWalesMike

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2 Comments

  1. NMac February 18, 2015 at 7:12 am - Reply

    Osborne, Cameron and other Tory “grandees” are all serial tax dodgers, after all they are selfish unpleasant people who don’t believe there is any such thing as society.

    • Mike Sivier February 18, 2015 at 12:11 pm - Reply

      Is that allegedly, or is there proof? We know Cameron’s father made his money from advising on it, and Osborne did so on national television, but did they actually do it themselves?

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