The Mirror headline this morning is:
The suggestion is simple:
David Cameron's election guru owns and runs a mysterious offshore company in Malta, the Mirror can reveal.
The link between Lynton Crosby and the notorious tax haven will cause acute embarrassment to the PM, who has described legal ploys to avoid tax as “morally wrong”.
Our investigation has found that Mr Crosby's Maltese firm Rutland is run from the offices of a trust firm specialising in “wealth preservation” and hiding the true identity of company owners.
I'm quotes in the story:
Campaigner Richard Murphy, of Tax Research, said: “It's legal for a non-dom to avoid tax on non-UK source income.
"The question is should the adviser to a party that says it wants to end tax haven abuse take advantage of that opportunity and stay in their post?”
That's a question for David Cameron to answer.
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He’d better hurry to answer it then. The money is on Cameron to be dumped midway through next year, with the frontrunner being a certain Mr Boris to replace him as leader.
Boris-the king of bluff,guff, bluster and blatherskite! This would be worse than Camoron as the populace would become more narcoleptically somniferous and in awe of this Etonion guff-merchant who supports his friends in the City, pedaling the trickle down myth of these ‘wealth’ producers. Jo-public seems to love these mega-rich narcisists and willingly tugs the forelock. All he does is stand up in front of the public with massive self-esteem and sound like Donald Sinden on acid! Why do we so willingly stoke the furnaces of these over-inflated egos?
Not the Daily Fail Headline. Exposed: foreign benefit scrounger it tories’ election strategist.
How does this response fit with the ‘moral’ issue?
A spokesman for CTF Partners said:
“Rutland is a legitimate company, which fulfils all its tax obligations in Malta.
It has never done any business in the UK or paid any dividends to anyone in the UK.
It has not received fees from any UK company, body, or individual.
Any claim, or attempt to claim, that it was set up, or is used, to avoid paying UK tax is categorically wrong and highly damaging.”
I’m not saying it was used to avoid UK tax
I asked a question about using tax havens and using non-dom status
Quite different
Max
I can’t help but think that CTF Partners have been very careful with the wording of their statement.
Fees could be routed via another offshore company and sent on to Rutland, for example and CTF Partners’ statement would still be true.
Australian taxes may be avoided and again CTF Partners’ statement would still be true.
I don’t wish to labour the point, but by scepticism makes me think that a tax dodge underpins the arrangement. Is it legal?
Given that Mr Crosby is likely to be not domiciled in the UK, it probably is for UK tax purposes. Without being aware of the totality (no doubt known only to his professional advisers!)of Mr Crosby’s arrangements it would hard to be certain on this point.
Is it morally questionable? Well Mr Cameron, as Richard rightly highlights, has described legal ploys to avoid tax as morally wrong, yet he is surrounded by tax dodgers and they have not suffered the same opprobrium as that handed out to Jimmy Carr!
I am sure all that is done is legal
It is the morality that is being questioned
that is all
I agree with you on thee silly non dom status. This is one section of the tax code I do not believe in. If you are living and working in the UK you shouldn’t be a non dom. I read an article from around 2001. It said there were over 18,000 non doms in the UK. THis is wrong, its a cheap escape for people who are registered elsewhere. I don’t see any political parties stopping it, however I don’t think it will affect the UK as a whole very much. I also believe that one of the Dragons dens people either was or is a non don. Its wrong, it needs to stop.
I’m not sure if Lynton Crosby is even tax resident in the UK. Does anyone know?
I don’t think David Cameron went as far as to label all legal ploys to reduce someone’s tax bill as morally wrong; that statement was made in relation to Jimmy Carr’s use of an Employee Benefit Trust scheme which allegedly sheltered the otherwise UK taxable income of a UK resident individual.
Since I don’t know no the ins and outs of Mr Crosby’s tax affairs, I don’t know if what he is doing amounts to anything that could be called tax abuse. Neither, I suspect, does anyone else commenting on here.
The media is awash with ill-informed stories about both “benefits cheats” and “tax cheats”. Personally I take both sets of stories with a pinch of salt but I’ve noticed a tendency for those politically on the left to decry the former stories and believe every word of the latter and those on the right to believe every word of the former and decry the latter.
His company says he is tax resident in the UK