Operator? There's a problem with my line.

Vodafone: they're not listening

Things Vodafone wants and which the state funds through taxation:

An educated workforce

A legal system for enforcing bill payment

 A telecommunications infrastructure

A distribution network to ensure that when you decide your phone is a month too old, you can get a new one on the spot

A healthcare system to keep employees and customers alive and texting. It even asks no questions when Vodafone users 'fall' on their phones while doing naked DIY and find the said phone lodged somewhere intimate. 

A benefits system which subsidises Vodafone employees' low pay. 

The advanced technology training required to design and build a satellite and computer-based technology which enables you to view grainy pornography from anywhere in the country (except my flat in a populous central city).

A Foreign Office and Business Office which makes damn sure those pesky Congolese don't start asking for salaries and masks while mining the precious metals required.

Amount Vodafone made in profit from UK operations this year:

£1.3,000,000,000 

Amount Vodafone pays in corporation tax to fund all these things:

£0.0

CEO's salary:

£14,000,000

Cuts to public services this year:

Disabled children's support

SureStart

School Building

NHS infrastructure and staffing

Policing

Armed services

Environmental protection

Tax collectors

Youth services

Employment service

Higher Education

and many more

Thanks to Vodafone and their friends, we will become poorer, sicker and thicker. Then they'll complain that their sales are down and the UK is an unstable market. At no point will they wonder whether they've contributed to this state of affairs at all. 

Obviously it's not just Vodafone amongst telecom firms, or business in general: Tesco are the biggest thieves. But as I have a Vodafone contract, they make me angriest. 

Non-taxable takeaways

According to this week's Private Eye and the FT, George Osborne personally lobbied the Indian Government to let Vodafone off paying a £2billion tax bill it dodged by channelling a takeover through an offshore tax haven… just like they've done here (your bill doesn't mention it, but Vodafone's actually a Liechtenstein shell company).

Osborne's claim is that if Vodafone has to pay its taxes, it and other companies won't invest in India. So? If Vodafone won't pay its taxes, it's not contributing, and can sod off. More to the point, if they can't make money and pay taxes, they're essentially saying that their profits are nothing more than subsidies from the Indian taxpayer (like British railway operators).

So the British chancellor is helping an offshore company avoid paying tax in a poor country to which we give £1 billion - aid to which his rightwing MPs and the Daily Mail object. Even worse, while Osborne tells the Indians they shouldn't close down abusive tax evasion, he's just done the same thing to Barclays. It can't be one rule for the rich countries and one for the poor… can it?

How about this? If we start telling Vodafone to pay its taxes, rather than helping them rip off poor countries, we won't have to give them any aid. Everyone's a winner. Meanwhile, how about asking our MPs to inquire why a UK Chancellor is spending his time helping an essentially foreign company rip off a foreign company?

Too radical?

They work for you?

Private Eye has being pursuing the head of the tax service, Dave Hartnett for quite some time. They allege that he personally - and illegitimately - oversaw cosy deals which allowed Vodafone to pay us £1.25bn instead of £6bn, and Goldman Sachs get away with £10m in interest they owed us (a criminal offence). This of course, looks like unequal access to justice: major corporations get to decide what if anything they hand over, whereas the rest of us cough up like good little citizens.

Hartnett gave evidence to Parliament recently. Did he confess his errors? Not quite.

Revenue officials did not follow correct procedures in two high-profile cases that could have left taxpayers millions of pounds out of pocket… an official neglected for a time to inform the board, leading to a delay which could have resulted in less tax being collected

By 'official', we should understand 'David Hartnett', not that he was about to admit it: he did secretive, personal deals with these companies, in breach of the law. Most startling was this nugget:

Hartnett refused to explain exactly what went wrong, how much tax may have been lost or confirm which companies may have escaped their full tax commitments. "…Mr Hartnett has refused even to indicate whether interest was paid by Vodafone on the tax due, despite confirming that it is an offence not to pay interest on tax owing… At present MPs can be briefed in confidence by the intelligence services, yet cannot find out any details of improper private tax deals done by the taxman. Even Treasury ministers are left in the dark."

So our elected representatives can compel spies to spill the beans, but the tax service doesn't even have to tell the Treasury what deals it cuts, let alone MPs or - god forbid - the citizenry. Banana, anyone?

The tax deal that never was…

All the media are repeating the government line that today's deal with Switzerland will result in billions of evaded taxes finally coming in to the government's coffers.

Huzzah for Cameron and his offshore-trust beneficiary Chancellor.

And if you swallow this, then you're a fool.

The agreement allows individuals with Swiss bank accounts to either declare their holdings to the Inland Revenue, or make a one-off payment to the Swiss government, followed by a withholding tax each year. The cash will be transferred to the UK Treasury. What we don't know, of course, is whether the level will be high enough to deter - or encourage - this behaviour. The account holders will still remain anonymous, and so out of reach, despite the fact that what they're doing is a criminal offence

But never mind this: individual rich tax cheats will always be with us and the new rules explicitly prevent the British from going on fishing expeditions for these criminals: imagine if we decided that only a small number of rioters could be pursued each year, and that the penalties would be administrative rather than judicial. Each year, millions of British people fill in tax returns. If they're late, you get fined. If they're wrong, you can go to prison. But now, you can hold your cash in Switzerland. If you get caught, you'll pay a bit of cash, but there's no prospect of gaol for ripping of those of us who work hard and pay our taxes.

One gaping hole is the complete absence of corporate, shell and trust holdings (of the kind George Osborne will benefit from): companies are going to see this as explicit approval from our government, and will hide as much of their profits from us as possible, despite the fact that it's the British legal, institutional, educational and physical infrastructure that makes them so profitable. This is theft, and the UK government has legalised it.

They aren't the major problem. The real problem is that this minor deal is a plot between the Swiss and the British to wreck plans for a Europe-wide tax agreement. 

Now why would the UK want to ruin a plan to stop companies and individuals hiding their ill-gotten gains in offshore tax havens? Because, as Shaxson's horrifying book Treasure Islands reveals, the UK (and Ireland) are essentially revolving doors between honest countries and the various tax havens scattered around the globe. Tax havens that are, for the most part, former British colonies. The City of London is a big bucket into which pours offshore money for laundering into legitimate investment, and money heading for tax havens away from the prying eyes of the tax authorities.

If the EU had signed a transparency deal, the Caymans, Turks and Caicos, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man would all have been covered, as well as Switzerland: the hundreds of billions hidden away would have been recovered, and some of these parasites would have gone to prison. This deal isn't about Switzerland. It's about the Tories helping their friends in all the other tax havens to carry on stealing. This is what Richard Murphy, accountant and founder of the Tax Justice Network, has to say:

In that case let’s not put too fine a point on this: this is the Treasury and our political leaders going out of their way to support criminality by making sure that a measure – the European Union Savings Tax Directive - that would blow tax evasion in British dependencies apart cannot now be implemented. And all, no doubt, at the behest of the City of London.

Which is odd, because I thought governments were meant to collect taxes, then spend them on behalf of its citizens.

Cracks in Tory Paradise?

Idling through my visitor logs, I discover that someone's been looking at the George Osborne: Artful Dodger poster, detailing his dubious tax-evading multimillion pound trust fund.

Nothing out of the ordinary about that, you may think. Until you see where this reader is.

State/Region	:	Oxfordshire
City	:	Witney

Yes. It's David Cameron's constituency home. You'd think that the Prime Minister would already know the tax avoiding tricks. Osborne lives next door - just call round and ask him about it Dave!

Come to the sunny Caymans

I was annoyed by this advert in the weekend's press:

So I asked Neal to do a little Photoshopping and he's come up trumps. (The quality of the picture is my fault - taken on my crappy phone),

Poor ickle Lib Dems

Those fearless politicians have cancelled a conference in case those nasty students stand outside shouting rude things about them.

Their logo isn't the only thing that yellow about the Lib Dems (though it's time the Tories got a similar pasting).

If you're free on Saturday, you could always join in the Taxpayers' Revolt: gathering outside Philip Green's retail empire to point out to shoppers that this government adviser paid himself £1.2 billion tax free by routing it all via Monaco, while our public services are cut.

Tax? Search me…

Very interesting article on how Google's effective tax rate is around 2% (and on how Ireland bankrupted itself):

 Google’s office in Ireland is the center of the company’s international operations.  In 2009 it “was credited with 88 percent of the search juggernaut’s $12.5 billion in sales outside the U.S.”  But Google doesn’t pay taxes on that amount, because most of the profits went to Bermuda, where there is no corporate income tax.

So, how did Google get its profits to Bermuda?  Businessweek explains:

Google’s profits travel to the island’s white sands via a convoluted route known to tax lawyers as the “Double Irish” and the “Dutch Sandwich.” In Google’s case, it generally works like this: When a company in Europe, the Middle East, or Africa purchases a search ad through Google, it sends the money to Google Ireland. The Irish government taxes corporate profits at 12.5 percent, but Google mostly escapes that tax because its earnings don’t stay in the Dublin office, which reported a pretax profit of less than 1 percent of revenues in 2008.

Irish law makes it difficult for Google to send the money directly to Bermuda without incurring a large tax hit, so the payment makes a brief detour through the Netherlands, since Ireland doesn’t tax certain payments to companies in other European Union states. Once the money is in the Netherlands, Google can take advantage of generous Dutch tax laws. Its subsidiary there, Google Netherlands Holdings, is just a shell (it has no employees) and passes on about 99.8 percent of what it collects to Bermuda. (The subsidiary managed in Bermuda is technically an Irish company, hence the “Double Irish” nickname.)

This set-up (as Businessweek describes it) also helps Google lower its tax bill in the U.S.  Google Ireland licenses its search and advertizing technology from Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.  Obviously this technology is worth a lot—but Google headquarters keeps the licensing fee to Google Ireland low.  Doing so means that Google headquarters can minimize its U.S. earnings and thus its tax obligations to the U.S. government.  And of course, Google Ireland knows how to move its profits around to minimize its tax liabilities.

 “Facebook is preparing a structure similar to Google’s that will send earnings from Ireland to the Cayman Islands, according to company filings and a person familiar with the arrangement.”  Microsoft already has one in place. 

Fat man tells us to tighten our belts

Depressingly, the Tories have pulled what's known in the game as an Alan Sugar - get some smug fat rich greedy selfish bastard from 'business' to park his arse on a plush seat and tell the government how to be 'efficient' in exchange for a peerage.

This time, the Tory Scum and their Lib Dem groundskeepers have pulled a blinder. They've called in Sir Philip Green.

Who?

He owns most of your high street shops. Or rather - for tax purposes - his wife does (how I hope she'll divorce him). They live in Monaco, which is conveniently out of reach of the UK tax man. So Porky Phil pays his wife £1.2 billion from company profits earned in Britain and evades paying taxes or as the Guardian puts it

a man who is careful to arrange his own finances so as not to needlessly benefit the common weal. Though he may run a tight ship in his businesses, in private Sir Philip is a hedonistic voluptuary, whose permatanned corpulence bears witness to his lifestyle as accurately as Cripps's own skeletal physique did in the 1940s.

It is hard to put it better than the man who, during the election, reacted to the endorsement of the Conservative anti-tax campaign by Sir Philip and other big business beasts by saying: "I have no time for billionaire tax dodgers who step off the plane from their tax havens into the country where they make their money and have the effrontery to tell us how to vote and how to run our tax policies. If some of them came onshore and paid their taxes it would make a useful dent in the budget deficit." Fine words from Vince Cable. Now stand by them. 

How Day 1 won't go in his new job:

Prime Minister: So, Sir Phil. How are we going to get out of the red?
Green stuff: Well PM, how about I and everyone like me start paying tax like the poor have to, instead of just bunging your party a few million every now and then?
PM: Intriguing idea. It might just work.

Well well well

The American War of Independence was fully justified by the cry of No Taxation Without Representation: the American colonies were taxed to the hilt but refused a voice in British politics.

In the UK, we need a new cry: No Representation Without Taxation. The people in the House of Lords (the upper chamber of Parliament) who have a say and a vote on laws affecting this country without ever facing the voters and therefore never giving us the chance to throw them out. This is a disgrace.

Even more disgracefully, some of these people get to vote on laws, including tax laws, while not paying tax. Amongst them are the Chancellor of The Hegemon (this university is suffering badly through funding cuts, and he's avoiding paying his fair share!), and Lord Ashcroft. This latter is living proof of Britain's disgraceful attitude to wealth and power. He has spent millions of pounds on Conservative Party campaigning, hugely distorting the election process, while avoiding paying tax: he claims he doesn't live in Britain, and is therefore non-domiciled. Except that for the past few years, he and his party refused to discuss the matter. Now, under pressure before an election and a change in the law, he's promised to change his status. Bully for him.

Lord Oakeshott, the Liberal Democrat peer, who has campaigned for a change in the law to prevent non-doms sitting in parliament, said: "Ashcroft has been sitting for the last 10 years in the British parliament, he has been voting on British laws and British public spending when he has not been paying full British tax like the other 60 million of us. That's a democratic disgrace. He has been pouring millions into conservative campaigning when he is not paying full British tax. So you have someone who keeps his assets offshore out of the British tax system and trying to buy a British election.

Once again: you're going to vote in a party which claims that the nation is broke, while being funded by the people who've beggared us: bankers and tax-avoiders. I despair, I really do.

Cadbury's Nationalists are far too late

There's a lot of whinging round here about evil multinational Kraft foods taking over cuddly British Cadbury's.

The arguments are threefold: firstly that British companies should stay British, secondly that Kraft will sack lots of people, and thirdly that Cadbury's is a uniquely ethical company that cares for its employees and community more than Kraft or most companies.

Kraft will sack lots of people. That's undeniable and reprehensible. Though I don't hear any whinging at all when British companies do the same to foreign ones.

Cadbury was an ethical, if paternalistic employer, part of the wave of Quaker industrialists of the Victorian period. That stopped a long time ago. The independent Cadbury Foundation does all that stuff now, and won't stop. So no worries there.

Finally, and most importantly, companies don't have nationalities. They have shareholders, who can be from anywhere, and don't give a flying one about anything other than profit. They also have directors and managers, and they don't care about flags either.

In the case of Cadbury, you're a particular fool if you think that it's in any way a 'British' company. If it was, it would pay a substantial amount of tax to the British government. That's how you commit to your community. Cadbury's hasn't done so for many years. It's a tax evader, and a particularly brazen one, having taken the UK government to court in their quest to become Irish.

Yes, you heard me. Cadbury's is an Irish company, amongst other locations: it pays virtually no tax in this country by making it look like it doesn't make any profits here, while making loads in tiny, low-tax Ireland (which is currently reaping the rewards of this shortsighted policy: no tax = bankruptcy).

Meanwhile, you may be surprised to learn that U2 is a Dutch band. Despite being massively wealthy and spending their time telling everyone to behave ethically, they've decided that getting a few more quid in their pockets is far more important than paying their bit to the state that nurtured them, and they've fecked off to Holland in pursuit of lower taxes.

This, my little friends, is why I'm a socialist, and why I see international finance as they enemy. They've dissolved nation states for corporate and mega-rich entities, leaving us to pay for all the things they need. Cadbury's needs literate, educated workers, it needs roads and food safety legislation and all the other things to function: it just doesn't want to pay for them. It wants us to pay for them, because we can't shop around for a lower tax regime.

Cadbury's makes me sick, and it's not just the chocolate.

Order of the Vole: Ronan Tynan

Dermot Desmond, a businessman of the most revolting kind (tax exile, brash, selfish capitalist, asset-stripper, financial conjuror: exactly the breed who sunk Ireland's economy) has proposed a 'global university of the arts' to revive Ireland's fortunes.

All well and good you might think. However, The Kerrywoman has sent me a letter from the Irish Times which nails Desmond's twisting duplicity (and that of the political class which encouraged these chisellers) perfectly:

Madam, – Dermot Desmond, when making his proposal for “a global university of culture and the arts” suggests that the unique Irish spirit is “undefeatable”; and while I agree with the latter, I regret he did not add if we all put our shoulder to the wheel (Front page, December 5th).

In case Mr Desmond, as one of the country’s leading tax exiles, has not noticed, we already have a number of potentially world-class cultural institutions, and they all share one thing in common – they have sustained, and are about to sustain further brutal cutbacks in State funds because of the collapse in tax revenue. The best thing he could do at the moment if he wants Ireland to reach its full potential in this area is to start paying tax like the rest of us.

Indeed, what was even more depressing about his proposal is that it reminds us that we live in a country where paying tax for the super rich is optional, with the first of the 163 published names he wrote to being Bono and U2, who also, coincidentally, moved the core of their empire out of Ireland to reduce their tax bills.

But should anyone have the right to become an “exile” in their own country for tax purposes? More to the point, with our country virtually bankrupt, does any member of the super rich have a right to hold an Irish passport if their families are living here, and they are claiming to be “exiles” for tax purposes, when they are in the papers more frequently than their peers, who are paying tax?

Surely the culture that makes such anti-social behaviour possible has contributed massively to the horrendous financial mess we find ourselves in at the moment? In the budget, the Minister for Finance must address this scandal. – Yours, etc,

RONAN TYNAN,

Blackrock,

Co Dublin.

Ronan Tynan: you sir, are The Plashing Vole's Hero of the Week.

Astroturf of the week

Astroturfing, in PR, is the practice of creating fake grassroots (get it?) pressure groups to alter the public debate on a given topic. One of the groups I've long suspected is the Taxpayers' Alliance, which is always popping up on serious news, critiquing the government (never the Tories). They've always stunk of low membership, lots of money and a dedication to no tax, rather than efficient government spending.

The Guardian has run a small and useful investigation: one of its directors harasses the UK government despite being resident in France, all its funding is from seriously rich Tory donors, and there basically isn't a membership. Instead, it's a particularly selfish Tory front. When you see them on screen, remember that they're just sock puppets for the worst Tory elements.

No representation without taxation

There are people in the House of Lords who don't pay tax. That's to say, they have a lifelong seat, with speaking and voting rights in the legislature without ever having to be elected, collecting attendance money and affecting the laws of this country, while hiding their money abroad. They don't contribute to the roads, health service, justice system, defence of the realm, environmental improvement or the education system, but reap all the rewards of living here and being listened to on whatever subject is on their minds.

There are also lots of tax exiles who live abroad but hand over large amounts of money to political parties to get their own way, such as Sean Connery, the Scottish Nationalist (Barbados Branch) amongst many others.

Lord Campbell-Savours moved an amendment to the Political Parties and Elections Bill outlawing this corrupt distortion of democracy. The government and the Tories are planning to allow this revolting practice to continue when the bill comes back to the Commons.

Lobby your MP: mail them, fax them, make a personal call. The rest of us pay taxes and get very little say in affairs - let's level the playing field. Contact your representative via They Work For You.

Arrrrggggghhhh - bastards.

I'm speechless with anger (which is OK because I've nobody to talk to) but luckily for you, I can still type. So I've diverted from the train station to share the rage.

The Taxpayers' Alliance is a small bunch of selfish, lying, cynical reactionaries, whose tiny membership believe that Thatcher and Pinochet were essentially communists. They'd rather let the poor starve, the old freeze and the sick die rather than pay any tax. So obviously they think that all politicians are thieves. All they want is lower tax - despite it already being lower than every civilised country I can think of.

The Daily Mail is a tumour. Its owner is a tax-evading, hypocritical harlot - a man with power but no responsibility. Again, the paper resents the existence of government. Lord Rothermere, owner of the Mail, lives in France. Except he doesn't. Well, it depends on who you ask. His milk and bread are delivered to a £50 million mansion in southwest England, which is definitely in England. Letters from the taxman, however, are delivered to a convenient address in France because he's officially 'non-domiciled' in Britain for tax purposes. Essentially, he's letting us pay to keep Britain the quite pleasant place it is for him to enjoy, while hiding his money elsewhere. No doubt he tells the French that he doesn't live there either.

Let's not forget that the Daily Mail stole the 1924 election by publishing the Zinoviev letters (which claimed that the Labour Party was a communist front) knowing them to be fake, openly supported Hitler and his British mini-me Oswald Mosley, tried to overthrow several governments, and was rancidly anti-semitic.

So what are these two unpleasant factions up to? They're raising money from the public to prosecute MPs for cheating us, the taxpayer. I know some MPs are corrupt. But most aren't, and we can sack those who are by voting for someone else. Lord Rothermere and this uninviting, loudmouthed pressure group however, can't be sacked, aren't elected, don't come under any proper scrutiny and can't be questioned. Rothermere is cheating you, me and everybody else, while pointing at MPs and shouting 'thief'. They've stolen a few thousand pounds. He's stolen millions. What can we do? Other than burn down his mansion (he won't mind, he says he doesn't live there), we can tell the truth to any Mail readers we know, and remind everybody that if you don't make a contribution to this country, you don't get a say.

Newspaper owners, including the Mail's in the 1930s and 1970s, plotted to overthrow the government through military means. Now they poison the less-informed because they resent democracy. They think riches qualify you to rule. They don't.

I'll stop now. I know you all think I'm a boring wanker for going on about this stuff, but it is really important and it's SO wrong.

No web access for the next few days. I'll miss you all, and Radio 4. I'm taking a Richard Sennett book along as a 'prop', as I don't have a copy of 'Friends of the British Museum'.

Is Lewis Hamilton black?

I only ask because he's moved to Switzerland. The largest party after the last election is the SVP, the Swiss People's Party. They're a charming bunch of racists who want to deport pretty much everybody.

Except Lewis. Now this could be because they consider him not black, but green - the colour of money. Perhaps they only dislike poor black people.

I presume that as an intelligent man of the world (despite being a despicable tax-evader), Lewis Hamilton knows the political state of affairs in Switzerland. Surely he's seen, from the back of his limo, variations of this SVP poster.

Which makes me think that Lewis doesn't consider himself black - otherwise he wouldn't feel welcome in Switzerland. The only aspect I can see that makes his presence acceptable to both is money - the universal lubricant which turns both parties into hypocrites: Lewis prefers living with racists to paying his fair share of tax, and the racists prefer living with rich black men rather than running their economy on egalitarian lines. Nobody comes out of this looking good.

Next up: Dutch band U2 and their creative approach to tax-dodging and charity… and don't get me started on Liberia. Half the world's shipping fleet is registered there to avoid paying crew properly and cheat on taxes but beg the big nations to help their piracy problem. I say - leave it to the Liberian navy on the basis that the shipping owners have paid their money and taken their choices.