(no subject)

(no subject)

Intriguing news that you may not have come across if you’re not a Private Eye regular or Twitter devotee: the Revenue looks to be allowing Vodafone off around £6 billion in dodged UK taxes. Private Eye’s full story is here, while financial website This Is Money tells it more concisely here.

HMRC has been looking increasingly tatty over the past few years, ever since Revenue and Customs were merged into one, clearly now too small, organisation. Its loss of half the nation’s data was the first prominent clue that something was up, and now it appears to have fewer and fewer resources available to investigate, let’s say, “sensible taxation management”.

There’s something darkly amusing about the fact that the offshore technique Vodafone has successfully employed to avoid UK tax has just been thoroughly rejected by the Indian High Court, which is ordering the company to pay around $2 billion in taxes it accrued when it bought Hutchinson’s mobile phone network in India. In this case all Vodafone’s nifty footwork with offshore registration in the Cayman Islands has counted for nothing, although obviously it will vigorously appeal. (I’ve actually seen Vodafone’s appeal submission. It’s just all the original documents with the words “Cayman Islands” highlighted and ringed repeatedly in indelible marker, surrounded by arrows and exclamation marks. It just might work.)

In unrelated news, Vodafone’s financial director, Andy Halford, is on a “business forum on tax and competitiveness” set up to advise the government. (NB Disappointingly, not this Andy Halford.)

Remember, that’s around £6 billion that’s just been written off for a corporation. The government has said it will impose drastic cuts on the poor, the sick and those who rely on public services because it needs to save £4 billion. Toy with that next time you see Nick Clegg doing his hilarious “fairness” routine on TV.*

* I know it’s not all Clegg’s fault, but we’ve been over this; the Tories can’t help themselves. This is just what they do. And they aren’t wasting too much effort on pretending that what’s coming is going to be fair.