Sir Philip Green: tax avoider gets job on the side
Posted on Friday 20 August, 2010
Filed Under Business, Conservative Party
PUT the firm in the name of the missus, set the old girl up with a nice little gaff down in Monaco, and then pay her a dividend of well over a billion quid. Tell the taxman to go swivel.
That’s essentially what Sir Philip Green did in 2005, so ensuring that not a single one of those 1,200,000,000 spons got unnecessarily spent on schools and hospitals and that sort of stuff. All 100% legit, natch.
The thing is, the Topshop boss has got an expensive lifestyle to maintain. Not only does he have to find the upkeep of the standard super-rich trimmings, like a £20m superyacht and a £27m private jet, but he has actually got a solid gold monopoly set. Pure class, that geezer.
And say what you like about Phil, he does know how to throw a good bash. We are talking about a bloke who spent £5m celebrating his 50th birthday with a three-day Roman toga party, with guests including Michael Winner, Jeremy Beadle and Stirling Moss. Both Tom Jones and Demis Roussos were hired to put on a turn.
Obviously such credentials leave the boy ideally placed to advise on ways and means of instituting austerity. Cameron has just appointed him to the role of public spending tsar, so that he can lead a crackdown on all those idlers larging it up on the public purse.
Meanwhile, as the Tories and the Liberal Democrats dream up fiendish new ways of cheese paring winter fuel payments to old biddies – many of them unable to afford a second home in Monaco for the wife – the Financial Times this morning leads on page one with the headline ‘Tax office to soften stance on avoidance’.
Dave Hartnett, permanent secretary of tax at Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs, laments that his outfit have been too tough on companies in disputes over tax assessments.
‘HMRC is packed full of very intelligent people but we are sometimes too black and white about the law,’ he told the Financial Times.
Let me run that past you again, slowly. Too black and white about the law? There was me thinking that the law says what it says, and that people have to stick to it or get busted. But no, it’s open to interpretation. If you are a wealthy company trying to avoid tax, that is.
Maybe such a line of reasoning is worth a try if you get hauled in for benefit fraud in the coming clampdown. Then again, maybe not.
The reality is that in Britain today, taxation for big businesses is basically optional, and the government job handed to Sir Philip symbolises and celebrates that state of affairs absolutely perfectly. Nothing like rubbing everybody’s nose in it, is there?
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It’s his money, he earned it, it’s his right to do what he wants with it.
That’s the difference, Dave. Dole bludgers, civil servants and even, yes, binmen, do it on my dime. That makes me perfectly entitled to bitch about what they do with my money and makes you perfectly unentitled to bitch about him.
Except he owes me 40% of that bill, at least.
Er no Dave, he doesn’t. Why? Because the law says so. If you don’t like the law, ask your MP to change it. Good luck with that because Labour were in for 13 years and they didn’t make it illegal to transfer your assets to your wife, or charge you tax if you do, and its pretty unlikely that the Coalition will change it either.
Because thats what it comes down to at the end of the day – laws. The government make the rules, and taxpayers must abide them. Exactly as Sir Phillip has. Cos if he hadn’t I think even HMRC might have noticed in such a high profile case.
What Green has done may be legal, but it makes him singularly unsuited to the govt job he’s been given. And he’s very prickly about this, having had a go at the BBC for having the temerity to ask him questions about his tax arrangements. Not the least unappealing feature of business people who venture into the political arena is that they combine monstrous egos with hyper-sensitivity and regard normal media scrutiny of their affairs as somehow outrageous (no doubt this is the result of careers surrounded by sycophants and yes-men). Tory MP Zac Goldsmith showed he was a chip of the old block with his recent eruption on C4 news. See also Alan Sugar when he was briefly around the Brown govt, Richard Branson and many others.
Sir Phillip inherited his wealth and opportunities and he has made his money from legalised robbery.
I can’t wait to hear him say “We are all in this together!”.
I’d just like to say a big thank you to Obnoxio the Clown. I really had no idea that he supported the public purse virtually single handedly. Most of us pay taxes, even lefties, civil servants and binmen but I guess if right wingers pay more than the rest of us then they are entitled to their constant bleating about how their money is spent.
The Clown:
“It’s his money, he earned it, it’s his right to do what he wants with it.
That’s the difference, Dave. Dole bludgers, civil servants and even, yes, binmen, do it on my dime. That makes me perfectly entitled to bitch about what they do with my money and makes you perfectly unentitled to bitch about him.”
Yeah, and the people serving drinks in the pub ‘do it on my dime’, that’s why it’s OK for me to hassle them at their work. I also pay, in part, the wages of Sainsbury’s workers, that’s why it’s OK for me to treat them like shit.
There is ‘no such thing as society’, is there for you, Clown, (apart, of course, from the bits you benefit from)? Pony up, you bastard.
I’m not sure what a ‘dime’ is
Isnt that some American word, as in ‘Brother can you spare a dime?’
I certainly will use this information the next time I am poncing around Phill’s gaff looking for some of his stuff to nick while I am not getting my five thousand of rhino Dole a week.
A dime is ten cents. I think a nickel is five cents.
Confusingly, the Americans talk about ‘pennies’ as well. Heard a new expression on tv this morning ‘a straw dollar’. Anyone knowd what that means?
no.
I bought some ginger biscuits the neet.
they have set me all on edge.
Quite right, Mr. (oops, sorry) Comrade Osler, the man’s a bounder and a rotter. The answer is obvious, all his money-making shops should be sequestered and turned over to be run by those hard-working, shrewd public employees of whom you and your readers wax so lyrical. I’m sure they can run them just as well as that awful Mr. Green and so I am confident, yes, confident, that HMG will continue to rake in the huge amounts of VAT and other taxes they have collected over recent decades.
Rumours put about by ill-wishers and nay-sayers to the effect that UNISON and/or UNITE couldn’t get a shag in a knocking shop are to be ignored, there is no chance of those hitherto profitable, taxable businesses going broke under their stewardship!
David Duff. There is a difference between tax avoidance and tax dodging. The latter being illegal. The people that are filthy rich but still avoid paying tax should not be employed by the government at taxpayers expense. There is nothing wrong with being an entrepreneur making money and employing people. The government is the custodian of the law and should ensure only honest taxpayers are empoyed by it.
Jimmy (if you will excuse the familiar), as you recognise that Mr. Green is not doing anything illegal because he is merely avoiding tax not dodging it, then there is no reason for HMG, or anyone else, not to employ him.
Incidentally, have a care with your reply, neither of us, I am sure, would wish to see our brave host hauled up before the ‘Cocklecarrots’ again!
David Duff. Indeed I AGREE that all British employees should have loyalty to Britain first and foremost just like our service personnel that fight our wars and pay tax.
Oh happy day, Jimmy, we agree! So what’s your beef with Mr. Green who has done nothing that I am aware of to indicate that he is less than totally loyal to his own country. Legally avoiding paying tax to profligate lunatics like Gordon Brown simple demonstrates his shrewdness, and in preferring to spend as much time as possible in a warm climate he shares the good sense of tens of thousands of pensioners who retire to places like Spain.
Correct me if I’m wrong – as I’m sure you will – I seem to remember that part of a serviceman’s overseas allowance in an operational area is now tax-free – and if it isn’t, it should be. And I just wish it had been when I spent a year living in a tent on the end of runway No. 2 at Bahrein airport in the ’60s!
(Starts to reminisce about his old army days as the nurse leads him away for his pills . . .)
David Duff. You lucky lucky basket. I spent more time in a basher! Apparantly the overseas allowance was doubled but is still taxable. A six months oversea tour is worth around £5,500 allowance. Keep taking the happy pills.
Jimmy, I once broke the army’s first rule – never volunteer – and as a result what should have been a bit of a jolly to Singapore (yeah, I know, I was a sucker) turned into an excuse to give us some jungle training. NEVER EVER AGAIN do I want to see even the edges of a jungle let alone the inside. I think I averaged about 3/4 of an hour sleep per night! Why the not-so-Intelligent Designer saw fit to invent quite so many zillions of flying, creeping, crawling thingies that EITHER bit me to pieces or frightened the life out of me, is beyond my understanding. However, that briefest of brief episodes was to raise my admiration for Slim’s WWII army to record heights.
People living on state benefits, civil servants and binmen are also receiving their income legally, unless you’ve got any evidence to the contrary. So if you don’t like people moaning about Green’s legal tax dodging, don’t moan about others legally getting a living from the state.
‘Boilermaker’, if your remarks were aimed at me I am not “moaning” about anything! Originally, before Jimmy dragged me off into ‘memoryland’, I was merely pointing out that those who seem to be particularly vindictive towards Mr. Green should beware lest he mutters the equivalent of ‘sod the lot of you’, closes down his shops and retires permanently to Monaco. I would remind you that those shops, apart from employing thousands of people, also earn HMG fortunes every year by way of taxes and thus go some way to paying for all those little baubles so beloved of socialists. You, of course, might suppose that the ‘Brother’ and ‘Sisters’ could run the shops just as well as fat, greedy Mr. Green. I, on the other hand, would fall about helpless with laughter at the conceit!
David Duff. I volunteered to take the lads in a four tonny from the exercise area to the local pub.(Denmark) Most of them did not turn up for the return journey. They all chucked in for taxis to get back. Cost them a fortune as well as being charged and fined. British soldiers, I love them to bits.
I was directing my comment at those above you, Duff. You seem to suffer from a different strain of idiocy.
Yes, incurable, so I’m told, ‘Boilermaker’.
Jimmy, I think I misunderstood you. I always associate the word ‘basher’ with jungle training where it is essential to build a platform off the ground to avoid being picked up during the night by things with more legs than I’ve had hot dinners and carried off into the night as a meal! In my outfit, on exercises in Europe, we either slept(!) in a slit trench or on the ground. A lightweight blanket and a poncho – and that was your lot.
“Happy days”, he dribbles into his soup totally forgetting that at the time it was usually a cold, wet, hungry, knackering pain in the – well, everywhere, really.
David Duff. You make your ‘basher’ with your poncho.
Not when you’ve got bugger all to support it with because you have to carry *everything* on your back, there being only 3x landrovers per battalion (not counting the A/Tk platoon).
David Duff. 4 x Bungees and some string does the trick. At least you do not have to carry the boilermaker in your webbing. Can you imagine listening to that during a CFT.