Here’s the current situation: Rishi Sunak has asked his (so-called) independent ethics advisor to “fully investigate” whether Nadhim Zahawi complied with the Ministerial Code in failing to make correct tax payments at the appropriate time.
This will be a big test for Sir Laurie Magnus. Smart thinkers say the purpose of an ethics advisor is to whitewash dodgy behaviour by ministers; if that doesn’t happen, if the decision goes against those in power, then the ethics advisor doesn’t last long in the post. We’ve seen that in recent years.
This is the story so far:
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Most people cannot avoid paying tax; it is taken from them automatically, or they face the threat of hefty penalties if they fail to file their tax return properly.
So when they see government officials getting away with apparent tax evasion with only a metaphorical slap on the wrist, they get very angry indeed.
Members of Rishi Sunak’s Tory government have closed ranks around Nadhim Zahawi, claiming that his tax affairs are perfectly in order – even though we know they haven’t been in the recent past.
And ‘Seatbelt’ Sunak himself hasn’t covered himself in glory lately either.
Will the Zahawi affair sink the government? Consider – and enjoy Maximilien Robespierre’s pronunciation of Zahawi’s surname:
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It looks like tax evasion to This Writer – and that would indeed be a crime.
Have a look at the video clip by A Different Bias, to get familiar with the story:
Phil Moorhouse gives some interesting information, but I think he’s mistaken on a couple of points.
Firstly, tax avoidance isn’t a crime; it’s the legal rearranging of a person’s financial affairs in order to pay as little tax as possible.
In this case, former Chancellor and stable-heater Nadhim Zahawi appears to have used Gibraltar-registered family trust Balshore Investments to hold shares in the polling firm YouGov.
That would be perfectly acceptable legally – it’s tax avoidance. I should make clear that Zahawi himself has claimed that he does not have, and never has had, an interest in Balshore Investments and he is not a beneficiary.
The stake in YouGov, worth more than £20 million, was sold by 2018, with the proceeds transferred to an unknown recipient.
Think tank Tax Policy Associates has estimated that this should have incurred capital gains tax of about £3.7 million.
It seems Zahawi had not paid it. That would be tax evasion, which is a crime – if, indeed, he had had an interest in Balshore Investments and had been a beneficiary.
But now it seems he has agreed to pay the money to HM Revenue and Customs. Why would he do that if he didn’t owe it?
The maximum penalty for tax evasion in the UK is seven years in prison or an unlimited fine.
Zahawi has not been fined. For that to happen, a court trial would have to have taken place. He has merely (we’re told) agreed to pay the money.
And this, as Phil said in the clip, is odd. If anybody in the general population had committed a benefit-related crime, they would have faced severe penalties.
So, if he did commit tax evasion, one would have to wonder how this former Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer has managed to get away with it.
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Campaign to discredit: is Kwasi Kwarteng trying to destroy Rishi Sunak? Or does the Chancellor deserve all the criticism he receives after raising our taxes but (allegedly) avoiding paying his own while his wife did the same?
Rishi Sunak is trying to curry sympathy from the public by pretending that somebody has launched a campaign to discredit him by linking him with the way his wife avoids paying UK tax.
He is – as in so many of his political choices – completely wrong.
Nobody needs to use his wife to discredit Sunak – they only need to look at his own decisions:
He vetoed a plan to save the poorest families from soaring energy bills, according to a government leak.
Three options were put forward: increasing the £200 loan payment for all households (to be paid in the autumn) to “£500 or more”, either for all households or for the poorest; delaying repayment of the £200, which the Treasury is saying must be repaid at the rate of £40 a year over the following five years; or exempting the poorest homes from the need to repay at all, turning the loan into a grant.
Sunak apparently refused to consider any of these options, which are said to have come from Kwasi Kwarteng’s Business, Innovation and Skills Department. If he really does think fellow members of the government are briefing the press against him, then Kwarteng seems a likely candidate for suspicion.
2. He blocked plans to reduce millions of energy bills by making homes more energy efficient, according to another government leak.
It seems both Downing Street and Kwarteng’s team were hoping for an expansion of the Energy Company Obligation (Eco) scheme to be included in this week’s energy security strategy, with £200 million extra per year meaning the scheme could be expanded beyond only those receiving benefits to thousands more people.
Sunak apparently rejected the ideas because he is sticking to pledges he made in autumn 2021 – even though inflation means his tax take is around two-and-a-half times what he expected to make from those proposals and he is entirely capable of doing as suggested.
3. He has benefited from his non-dom wife’s ability to avoid paying UK tax while increasing the tax burden on the rest of us to its highest level since World War 2.
As Akshata Murthy’s husband, Sunak shares his household with her and must, therefore, enjoy some of the benefits of her income. As a non-dom living in the UK, she has been able to avoid paying an estimated £2.1 million per year.
Sunak himself is said to have held a US Green Card, which allows people to live and work permanently in the United States but demands that he pay US tax on his worldwide income, until October last year – long after he became Chancellor in 2020 – meaning he may have avoided paying UK tax for the more-than-four years between that date and his joining the government in 2017.
Meanwhile, by freezing the thresholds at which people move into different tax bands, Sunak has ensured that more people are paying Income Tax at higher rates; he has also introduced a 10 per cent increase in National Insurance payments. The tax burden on UK citizens who have no choice other than to pay up is now at its highest level since the mid-1940s.
It’s a filthy record; it reads more like a charge sheet than a history of achievements.
But Rishi Rich still wants you to believe he and his wife are being smeared by malicious colleagues.
Isn’t it more accurate to say that the skeletons in his closet are coming to light at last?
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On the day most of us learned that billionaire Conservative donors have been squirrelling away trillions of pounds in tax havens rather than paying their fair share…
$11.3 trillion in wealth is held offshore while billions of people across the world have been plunged deeper into poverty during the pandemic.
It’s obscene.
Trickle down economics = wealth streaming offshore.
12 million leaked documents known as the Pandora Papers reveal that world leaders are engaging in widespread tax avoidance and money laundering with the UK at the epicentre. This will come as a huge shock to anyone with the memory of goldfish…https://t.co/g1XDqB84NO
… until poor people like This Writer (and, no doubt, yourself) have paid off the costs racked up by his government in coping with Covid-19…
In Tory Britain, working people face an unfair tax hike of hundreds of pounds a year, but a landlord renting out dozens of properties won’t pay a penny more.
… most of which went to Conservative donors who, after avoiding the tendering process by using a fast-track system for friends of the Tories, then provided absolutely nothing in return.
So, after the billionaires have kept public tax money for themselves and taken public cash under false pretences, they now say they’re paying too much tax and want the poor to cover any costs they have incurred. And Sunak is apologising to them for not doing this.
This looks like misappropriation of funds on a global scale.
And Sunak’s offer to cut taxes after the nonexistent bill is paid makes no sense at all, for an obvious reason:
The money of the rich disappears into offshore accounts – cut their taxes and more money disappears it does not trickle down.
Tax the rich and the money received can be invested in young people, climate justice, tackling inequality, health and poverty.
Sunak and his forerunners should have closed all tax avoidance loopholes in the 11 years since they have been in office but they haven’t. Is that because they have benefited from millions of pounds in donations from the people we now see have avoided paying trillions of pounds in tax?
£3.1 million of Tory Donations linked to 36 Tory MPs have now been from people named in the Pandora Papers.
He tried to cover it up by focusing on Brexit, saying that we’ll see the mythical benefits of leaving the European Union in the long term.
Rishi Sunak – "I was proud to back brexit… because in the long term the agility, flexibility & freedom provided by brexit would be more valuable… than proximity to a market"
I don't remember brexiteers telling us that the sunny uplands would be in the "long term" pic.twitter.com/XjuU9cTTDW
I think we all know what Brexit was really about – don’t we?
We probably shouldn't forget the reason we had Brexit was to enable the level of tax avoidance we're seeing in the Pandora Papers x
— Laura Kuenssberg Translator (@BBCPropagandist) October 4, 2021
Weirdly, the same Chancellor who has immorally handed billions to Tory donors via failed Covid schemes, and trillions to them by allowing tax avoidance, thinks such actions are perfectly reasonable.
To him, it would be immoral to take cash from them – that they want to lend – in order to fund, say, an anti-poverty strategy:
Rishi Sunak says it would be immoral to borrow to pay to keep children out of poverty. The first problem is he needs some lessons in what morality. Second, he needs to realise people (the wealthy) are queuing up to lend money to the government. Why is he refusing them the chance?
No – he thinks poorly-paid workers should simply get better jobs, as though that is the easiest thing in the world. Clearly he has never had to try to do it himself. And he conveniently forgets an enormous hole in his own logic:
If as Rishi Sunak suggests , a care worker who can’t manage on her wages simply retrain and get a better paid job , who is taking her place in an already short staffed care sector ?
Oh but – he said – the UK economy is recovering faster than anywhere else in the world!
But there’s a reason for that, isn’t there?
We have faster recovery than anyone else in the world for just one reason – we went lower than anyone else. If I was Sunak I would not be shouting about that.
Sunak wasn’t discussing serious plans to deal with current economic issues – he was auditioning to replace Boris Johnson as prime minister.
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Registered in a tax haven? Then no tax-funded help for you: there’s no reason the UK should give tax-dodging firms a hand during the coronavirus crisis if they haven’t paid their full dues. Wales and Scotland have made this clear; let’s see Westminster do the same.
Quite right too. If you’ve opted out of paying tax when the going was easy, then you can’t try to get help from the taxpayer in hard times.
Has the Tory government in Westminster made this decision yet?
The Scottish parliament has voted to block companies based in tax havens from using millions of pounds in coronavirus relief funding, in emergency legislation.
MSPs approved measures on Wednesday night brokered by the Scottish Greens to prohibit firms or individuals who are registered in tax havens, or are a subsidiary of an offshore company, from getting support grants.
The vote follows similar decisions by the Welsh government last week and by other EU member states, including Denmark and France, but ministers have yet to say how much Scottish government spending will be affected or how it will be enforced.
It is thought it could prevent companies with offshore links from applying to a new £120m enterprise resilience fund that provides grants for small- and medium-sized firms, and a £30m creative, tourism and hospitality bailout fund for firms that cannot get business rates relief.
The Welsh government blocked companies with headquarters in a tax haven from accessing its £500m economic resilience fund on 15 May. Ministers in Cardiff said last week it would affect a small number of companies.
Rishi Sunak: it seems he expects the poor to pay for coronavirus while the rich send billions of pounds to tax havens.
The Conservative government has allowed the super-rich to squirrel billions of pounds away in tax havens, while whining that the UK will have to tighten its national belt if it is to pay for the coronavirus crisis.
Legislation from 2016 that was intended to stop £2.5 billion in taxation from being lost to tax havens is being deliberately ignored by the Tories, according to the Tax Justice Network.
This is cash that could be used to help pay for the cost of coping with Covid-19, but instead it seems the Tories want working people and the very poor to pay for it.
Who is better-equipped? The idle rich who won’t do anything with the money apart from keep it away from the national purse? Or the vulnerable poor who will be trodden into the dirt by the deprivation of even more of their vital income?
The UK missed out on collecting £2.5 billion a year in corporate tax from multinational corporations due to the UK government failing to exercise a 2016 tax transparency law designed to prevent billions in corporate tax abuse.
Asked whether Chancellor Rishi Sunak plans to exercise powers under the Finance Act 2016 to make multinationals’ country by country reporting data public, the UK Treasury confirmed to Parliament this week that is has reversed its 2016 commitment to publishing the data at a national level, and is blocking the OECD from publishing the data at an international level.
Had the UK government exercised the powers afforded to it by the Finance Act 2016 to publish corporations’ country by country reporting data, the UK could have prevented at least £10 billion in corporate tax from being lost to tax havens since 2016, which could for example have offset the £6.6 billion the NHS is expected to receive in Covid-19 funding, and provided for additional investment in crucial equipment.
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Chris Davies: He supports tax avoidance and evasion, according to his voting record.
If you were reading This Site yesterday (July 30), you’ll be aware that a friend on Facebook has been looking at the Parliamentary voting record of Chris Davies, the former MP and current Conservative candidate in the Brecon and Radnorshire by-election – and it makes grim reading.
The same friend has now finished researching Mr Davies’s record on taxation and the results speak for themselves. Amongst other decisions…
• Davies voted against a series of proposals intended to reduce tax avoidance and evasion.
• Davies voted against an investigation into the banking industry’s failure to prevent tax evasion.
• Davies voted against requiring multinational enterprises to publish a country by country tax strategy including information on their attitude to tax planning (this could have established evidence to show how companies avoid paying tax).
• Davies voted against giving the Financial Conduct Authority and Prudential Regulation Authority duties to combat abusive tax avoidance arrangements.
• Davies voted not to support the publishing full details of the Government’s tax settlement with Google and for an international agreement to implement country-by-country reporting of company accounts.
So you can see that Mr Davies is a big fan of tax avoidance and evasion by corporations and the very rich. Conversely:
• Davies voted to ensure that victims of domestic abuse would have to pay extra charges – the bedroom tax – if they were provided with a secure tenancy that incorporates a spare room.
So he’s against tax fairness; he would let corporations and the rich get away without paying a huge amount of tax that would hugely contribute to public services, but he’s happy to hammer the vulnerable with an unfair and random tax that affects people according to the accommodation that is allocated to them (which in turn is based on what is available).
I hope the people of Brecon and Radnorshire pay attention to this abysmal record – while also remembering that Mr Davies is himself a convict, having been found guilty of faking expenses claims earlier this year.
Mr Davies should never have been voted into Westminster. It is time to kick him back into the political wilderness.
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Conservatives and corruption – once again those words appear to fit together like they were made for each other.
It is not credible for a Conservative MP with connections to the tax avoidance industry to be involved in efforts to curtail that industry’s activities.
But that is what we see in the employment of Mel Stride on such work in the Treasury, when his father – also Melvin Stride – sells “tax investigation insurance” to safeguard possible tax avoiders from HMRC prosecution.
Apparently nobody in the government saw anything amiss with that.
Now for a very important question.
Do you know someone who voted Conservative in the local elections?
If so, why not remind them that their vote supports this corruption?
A tax avoidance crackdown is being spearheaded by a Treasury minister whose father sells insurance to those being targeted by HMRC.
His father, also called Melvyn Stride, owns a company that sells “tax investigation insurance” to businesses subject to HMRC inquiries, Telegraph Money can disclose.
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