Sir James Crosby has gone.
Now we need Glen Moreno and Sir David Walker to join him on the plank.
Then it's Eric Daniels of Lloyds who yesterday suggested his £2.79 million annual pay was nothing untoward. And who said to the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee yesterday that "I would tell you that we do not do anything other than adhere to the spirit and letter of the law" and "The law is very clear about the amount of tax that we have to pay and we adhere to that strictly." Which is no doubt why HMRC are pursuing them in tribunal for an abuse of the letter, let alone the spirit of the law.
And then there's John Varley of Barclays (don't worry - his bank will need state aid in the end - it's far too dodgy to survive without it) who said "I don't recognise this statement that we have undertaken tax avoidance schemes. What we are required to do as a publicly owned company is to manage our tax affairs efficiently."
Oh yes Mr Varley? Where does it say that? And why are you so widely known as the biggest tax avoider in the field in that case?
And what do they all share in common? A willingness to be completely blind to the truth. A delight in abusive financial structures. A belief in offshore. To put it simply: they have created a make believe world in which they gain. The rest lose but they protect themselves from realising that. They have become so deluded that they really do not know when they are making statements that are so obviously unacceptable to all right minded people.
We can survive this recession. We can't with these people in their current positions.
We can't if their belief system survives.
It takes people to say this to achieve change. In that respect I liked the quote made by HBOS whistle blower Paul Moore:
You can't defeat Goliath with your mouth shut.
Some of us have had our mouths wide open for some time.
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Brilliant and courageous as always. The clever word for all this is regulatory arbitrage. And it has been prolific in the UK for a long time, and the regulators, including the HMRC have been aware of it. So they were all somehow complicit. Thatcher started the favouritism toward financial services which was continued by new Labour. And in the last 30 yrs the average per capita financial IQ of Britain has been among the poorest in the world. Exploit everyone goes the motto – and integrity long went out of the window. And guess what – integrity cannot be reinvented overnight. Ah, big problem now. Perhaps give power to minorities with cultures of integrity? Any chance? or are they not slick enough to defraud.
“You can’t defeat Goliath with your mouth shut.”
Didn’t David defeat Goliath with a sling and a stone?, so it would appear you can.
As for Mr Valey, he has to act in the interest of his shareholders, to add value to the company. One of those ways is to reduce costs to the company. If the company is over paying taxes, it is his job to ensure that taxes are minimised to the amount the company is legally entitled to pay, otherwise he could be at risk of breaching his fiduciary duties.
Atul
Thanks
Agreed
Best
Richard
Creg
Wrong: tax is not a cost to business
Tax is a distribution to society in exchange for the licence to operate
It is a distribution out of profit
The attempt to minimise it is a deliberate act of some to redistribute the benefit of economic activity within society from those who need the benefit of taxation revenues to those who do not
Richard
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