I’m pleased to see Vince Cable has shared the documents leaked to him by a Barclays Capital insider to more papers. I had them on Friday to comment for the Sunday Times. Now the Guardian has the same papers, and I gather they have gone to HMRC.

I don’t have time to comment on them in more detail today: suffice to say all I have read suggests that these papers reveal an extraordinary willingness to arbitrgae tax, company law and accounting rules to divert the public benefit of taxpayers funds to the private advantage of Barclays, and as the whistleblower makes clear, the staff of Barclays Capital.

The whistleblower (whose identity I know) has taken some considerable risk in revealing these documents. I guess he is aware his career is over. But I admire his reasons for this. As he says:

In a financial market devastated by the credit crunch, the SCM (Structured Capital Markets) team is one of the only teams still aggressively hiring to increase further its reach and ability to structure more trades. Where the world sees turmoil and destruction, the leaders of SCM see opportunities arising from tax loss exploitation and corporate restructurings throwing up all sorts of new and juicy areas of the tax code which can be profitably exploited.

He adds:

The last year has seen the global taxpayer having to rescue the global financial system. The taxpayer has already had a gun put to their head and been told to pay up or to watch the financial system and life as we know it disappear into a black hole. It is increasingly difficult to accept that an unintended consequence of saving the financial system is that teams such as SCM will grow more aggressively to reduce tax globally whilst their competitors wilt under increased government scrutiny (as a result of the UK and US governments taking stakes in these banks). Banks should now be encouraged to pay a fair tax (and restrict the sizes of their SCM teams) on their profits given the service provided by society to banks thereby easing the pain taxpayers all face today.

Some of us have argued this for a long time.

I have to admit, we’ve been right to do so.

Now it is time for action.