TAX-FREE LORDS - MOVE YOUR MONEY ON-SHORE

The Guardian UK newspaper reports that of the highest Lords in the land, 68 have been discovered fiddling their taxes through tax-havens. The reporters had to rely on a 2009 list of 35 tax-havens compiled by US Congress - as the UK tax offices are too coy, shy and polite (to the 68 Peers of the Realm) to mention tax-havens. What the newspaper did repeat is the Wall Street-City-PR generated crap that "tax avoidance is completely legal". This is utter nonsense as my letter to the Guardian spells out.

MONEY WARS - WHERE HAS ALL THE MONEY GONE?

Britain has been a leading, profitable, trading nation for hundreds of years, making huge surpluses every year.  Where has this vast fortune gone. Who has the UK's assets?

If 68 of our law makers are found to use tax-havens, it is certain that many more have not been outed as tax-evaders. This massive tax-evading-capital-flight is bankrupting national economies - then forcing us to borrow our own money back from "The Free Markets" at usurious rates. When will the OECD send in troops to shut the damn tax-havens down and repatriate all the $21 trillion they hold? How much longer do we have to suffer these economically sabotaging, crooked, destructive, silly, greedy pantomimes?

TAX AND ECONOMICS ARTICLES 29TH APR 13

LETTER TO THE GUARDIAN:

Your headline article “Make UK more like a tax-haven” Friday 21 Sept 12, is qualified by you saying about such schemes (1) …that allow ‘morally repugnant’ albeit legal, aggressive tax avoidance - and (2) Legal tax avoidance represents nearly 14% of UK…

With 30 years hands-on experience of tax dodgers, I assure you that most documents used between UK persons and corporations and tax-havens are illegal, because they interpose non-commercial, unnecessary, fictitious steps, valuations and dummy officers into trading and transfer-pricing invoices. This is criminal, false accounting and fraudulent conspiracy. Your editors and reporters cannot possibly know and so should not write, in this highly complex field of law and auditing, that the majority of tax-avoiding-capital-flight arrangements are “legal”. Most are clumsily contrived bookkeeping pretences and banal lies, which fail to meet the 100 year old laws, designed to inject truth and reality into Tax Returns, however obscured and convoluted.

Good tax planners guarantee to their clients any taxes, fines and compound interest and the legal costs of their schemes unravelling. Before blandly stating “tax avoidance is legal” you should check the, often idiotic, schemes; and check the tax-planners guarantees given to their clients. Only fully guaranteed schemes might be classed as “legal”. But even those may fail in UK courts.

Noel Hodson, Oxford.