This is, of course, all completely barking. It's from Iain Clifford Stamp, a "sovereign citizen" scammer who was sentenced to twelve months imprisonment last month, for completely ignoring court orders. .judiciary.uk/judgments/comm…
Stamp charges vulnerable people thousands of pounds on the false promise he will make their mortgages disappear and magic money out of nowhere. He makes millions from it.
Stamp says he's fled to Northern Cyprus to escape justice. He's still flogging his weird cult-like-scheme. It's destroyed relationships and broken up families.
Can anyone stop him?
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Just announced: the UK's most famous libel firm, Carter-Ruck, is being prosecuted before the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal for recklessly enabling a $4bn fraud
It's astonishing how reckless Carter-Ruck was - likely causing $$$ more to be lost to fraudsters
We then conducted a detailed investigation and legal analysis of what Carter-Ruck did, and what they should have known at the time. I'll summarise in this thread, but way more detail here: taxpolicy.org.uk/2023/12/18/car…
In 2017, a new corporate criminal offence was created: failure to prevent tax evasion. It was meant to change everything.
Since then? Zero prosecutions.
Until now...
HMRC is prosecuting an accounting firm, Bennett Verby Ltd, for failure to prevent facilitation of UK tax evasion, contrary to section 45 of the Criminal Finances Act (2017).
It's connected with alleged Research and Development repayment fraud. Six individuals are also being prosecuted.
All due to appear at Manchester Crown Court (Crown Square) on August 7.
In 2022, Nadhim Zahawi’s solicitor sent me a libel threat - and said I wasn’t even allowed to say he’d written to me.
The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal ruled that was improper.
Now he’s appealing.
A 🧵 on why it matters.
In July 2022, I wrote that I thought Nadhim Zahawi had lied about his taxes. I was right. Nadhim Zahawi lied repeatedly about his tax affairs...
... and continued to do so until it became public that - at the same time he was saying he'd always paid taxes in full - he was negotiating a £5m settlement with HMRC, including back-taxes plus penalties.
No, charging VAT on private healthcare is not a re-run of the VAT/education debate.
It wouldn't just impact 5% of the population - everyone who sees a private dentist/optician would pay more.
And it wouldn't raise £2bn. Plausibly it would lose money.
Thread
I'm going to ignore the political question of whether we *should* be thinking about scrapping the VAT healthcare exemption. I'll just focus on whether it works on its own terms.
Lord Kinnock's £2bn HMRC figure seems to come from the HMRC "estimated cost of structural tax reliefs" table
No: the government hasn’t raided the National Insurance Fund.
No: the surplus can’t be used for anything you like, without loading our children with debt/taxes.
Here’s why. 🧵
First, that "surplus" is there for a reason: as a buffer to cover pensions/social security for an aging population. The Government Actuary estimates that the fund will be exhausted by 2043/44
Take money out of the fund now, and we hit a fiscal crisis in 20 years' time
Second, governments have not "raided it to fund NIC cuts for the rich". There have been no NIC cuts for the rich in my lifetime.
We reported two years ago on an outrageous "tax avoidance" scheme (which we thought was fraud) which split one business into 10,000 companies, each claiming small business tax reliefs, and hiring Filipino directors off Facebook to prevent HMRC investigating.
What's worse, the scheme was enabled by an opinion from Giles Goodfellow KC. He should have known the scheme was fraudulent. He certainly shouldn't have said the scheme worked as a matter of law
HMRC has been attacking these structures. In a v similar case last year, a tribunal ruled that the thousands of artificial companies couldn't claim small business reliefs, but (for technical reasons) prevented HMRC from deregistering the companies from VAT.