A multimillion-pound Revenue & Customs publicity campaign to stamp out tax evasion and avoidance used an advertising agency ultimately controlled in an offshore haven.
HMRC spent more than £6 million on the campaigns, including £300,000 specifically on offshore evasion. Among the agencies used was TNS, a research agency, whose ultimate parent company and controlling party is WPP, the world's biggest advertising company which is incorporated in Jersey.
You couldn't make it up.
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This won’t come as a surprise to any one in HMRC. Most are threatened with their workplace closing, and large numbers will lose their jobs. This is largely driven by the Department’s buildings all being flogged off to privateer company, Mapeley. When the contract expires in 2021 Mapeley will be able to kick HMRC out of the offices it now uses. The Mapeley company that acquired the property maximised its profit by being based in Bermuda.
The plc at the top of the WPP group is incorporated in Jersey, but it is resident for tax purposes in the UK. (Yes, they redomiciled to Ireland in 2008, where it paid 25% Irish corporation tax as a non-trading company, but avoided the UK’s CFC rules as they were then. It re-established UK tax residence in 2013.)
In its 2015 preliminary results, WPP reported tax in 2015 of £247m on profits of £1,245m (that is, tax at 20%) on revenues of £12.2 billion (about 10% profit margin; the largest cost item appears to be its 180,000 or so people who no doubt pay lots of income tax where they are based, in the UK, the US, China, India, Europe, etc).
Not so offshore, really.
But they demonstrated it was optional