Tory tax avoidance advice firm had £145m Covid contract unlawfully, says lawyer
The ‘Big Four’ accountancy firm Deloitte is being pursued in the courts over a claim that a £145 million consultancy contract related to Covid-19 was handed to it unlawfully.
There’s also an issue over the fact that the Conservatives failed to announce details of the five-month contract until after it had expired.
Deloitte is well-known to the Tory government. One of the main accountancy firms involved in creating tax avoidance schemes, it also advised the Cameron government on – guess what? – tax avoidance.
This Writer has a feeling there may have been a conflict of interest there…
Now, Deloitte is being criticised after it received 25 Covid-related contracts, totalling £193.3 million, courtesy of Tory peer James Bethell, the government minister in charge of test and trace. Of these, five – worth £170.5 million – were awarded directly with no competition.
Lord Bethell previously ran a lobbying company that represented Deloitte as they won over £700 million of government contracts on Chris Grayling’s Work Programme schemes for the unemployed.
This Writer has a feeling there may have been a conflict of interest there, too…
The most important issue here is the misuse of public money.
In the Mirror article, Jolyon Maugham of the Good Law Project makes a good point:
“It’s like we set up a whole new Government department, but instead of civil servants paid £40k a year, it’s run by hundreds of private consultants for whom we pay £40k a month.”
That is not responsible use of public funds! Yet the Tories keep presenting themselves to us as the Party of Economic Responsibility.
It simply isn’t true.
They create money by the billion, shovel it out to their cronies and chums, and then tell those of us who don’t use Deloitte’s tax avoidance schemes that we have to pay for it in our tax bills!
It is corrupt; it is a perversion of government. It is exactly the kind of behaviour we have come to expect from Boris Johnson and his people. And it is right that it should be challenged.
Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.
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Any government that behaves in such a way is nothing more than a corrupt regime worthy of the reasons given for attacking Syria’s government which was democratically elected by 72% of it’s population, whereas Tories scraped in with a far lesser percentage of votes cast. The double standards being applied are an indication of the hubris both Starmer and the Tories excel at. One rule for our corrupt regime and another for a country who has oil we want to benefit from it’s theft by our “special relationship” partners in Washington.
Nice one.