{"id":160,"date":"2006-09-29T14:50:00","date_gmt":"2006-09-29T12:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2006\/09\/29\/the-more-you-have-the-easier-it-is-to-avoid-tax\/"},"modified":"2006-09-29T14:50:00","modified_gmt":"2006-09-29T12:50:00","slug":"the-more-you-have-the-easier-it-is-to-avoid-tax","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2006\/09\/29\/the-more-you-have-the-easier-it-is-to-avoid-tax\/","title":{"rendered":"The more you have the easier it is to avoid tax"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Take <a href=\"http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/free_forbes\/2006\/1009\/052b.html\" target=\"_blank\">this story<\/a> from Forbes, for example. As they put it:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Why pay tax if you don't have to? Thomas Siebel used a corporate beast with the colorful name \"horizontal double dummy\" to avoid a big tax hit when he sold his Siebel Systems to Oracle (nasdaq: ORCL - news - people ) this year. Worth $1.5 billion and No. 242 on our rich list, Siebel sidestepped a capital gains tax bill of at least $58 million by employing the perfectly legal device. His Siebel stock was valued at $488 million at the time of the $5.8 billion merger.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>I wonder what good that $58 million might have done? And I bet it's hardly made any difference to his own perception of wellbeing.<\/p>\n<p>Of course government's don't always spend their tax receipts well. But arrangements such as this don't do society any good at all. And even Forbes seems to realise this.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p class=\"zoundry_bw_tags\">\n  <!-- Tag links generated by Zoundry Blog Writer. Do not manually edit. http:\/\/www.zoundry.com --><br \/>\n  <span class=\"ztags\"><span class=\"ztagspace\">Technorati<\/span> : <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/tax%20avoidance\" class=\"ztag\" rel=\"tag\">tax avoidance<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Take this story from Forbes, for example. As they put it: Why pay tax if you don&#8217;t have to? Thomas Siebel used a corporate beast<br \/><a class=\"moretag\" href=\"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2006\/09\/29\/the-more-you-have-the-easier-it-is-to-avoid-tax\/\"><em> Read the full article&#8230;<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tax-avoidance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}