This video is brilliant.

Seems a total slam dunk that owners of private jets should pay fuel duties.

Doesn't it?

The answer is annoying. In principle this is obvious: of course there should be duty on private jet fuel . Both as a revenue raiser and (more importantly) to deter an inefficient source of CO2 emissions ("properly price an externality"). But.

Shocking article in the Sheffield Tribune. A solicitor, Andrew Milne, buying up freeholds of houses and then making (false) threats to the leaseholders to bully them into buying the freehold at a huge premium. This goes way beyond a lawyer acting unethically. If Milne knows the statements he's making are false (and it seems likely he does) then it's fraud.

Douglas Barrowman and Michelle Mone made £65m selling faulty PPE to the Government.

HMRC now wants £39m in unpaid tax — and we think we know why: Barrowman and Mone may have avoided tax on their £65m profit. During the pandemic, Douglas Barrowman's company, PPE Medpro, sold £200 million of PPE to the Government. It made £65m profit, which went into trusts benefiting Barrowman and Mone's families.

What if there was a consensus on the tax reforms the UK needs?

What if it was backed by policy experts from think tanks across the political spectrum, from the Adam Smith Institute to the Resolution Foundation?

The consensus is real. The question is: will anyone act on it? Launching today is a series of proposals backed by the Adam Smith Institute, Bright Blue, CenTax, the Centre for Policy Studies, the Institute for Public Policy Research, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the New Economics Foundation, Resolution Foundation, Tax Policy Associates.

Carter-Ruck, the UK’s most notorious libel firm, used abusive litigation to silence criticism of a former Tory donor.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority is investigating - but Carter-Ruck just filed a judicial review. If successful, they'll have total impunity.

Thread: The donor is Mohamed Amersi.

Former Tory MP @CharlotteLeslie wrote a private note on Amersi's activities. As @DavidDavisMP said, Amersi then "used his wealth and influence to try to bully Charlotte Leslie into silence".

Lots of people say the Government should significantly cut spending. Hardly any spell out how that could be achieved.

So kudos to the Policy Exchange for a serious-minded report proposing spending cuts taking the size of the state down to where it was before the pandemic. Key proposals:

1. freeze state pensions for three years and end triple lock
2. freeze benefits for three years
3. £20 fee for seeing a GP

VAT on financial services = VAT on everyone’s mortgage payments.

Mr Polanski does know that. Doesn’t he?

https://twitter.com/_boldpolitics/status/1981070414026575997

h/t @ChristianJMay

I am being personally sued for more than £8m by a barrister, Setu Kamal. I believe this is one of the largest English libel claims ever made. Mr Kamal objects to a report we published back in February about a firm called Arka Wealth (which appears to have since gone out of business).

We will not be taking it down.

A "British ISA" was a terrible idea when the Conservatives were thinking about it, and it remains a terrible idea today. A really important insight of investment theory is to diversify across countries, and put no more than a small % in the UK.

It's not the role of Government to force people to invest badly.

(This is from a brilliant article by Vanguard ) vanguard.co.uk/professional/v…

Hello, internet. The definition of tax evasion is not "when people I don't like politically do it, it's tax evasion"
Lots of people pay the wrong amount of tax by accident. I've done it myself.

The result: you pay the tax, plus interest. If you were careless, you often pay penalties. It's not tax evasion. It's not illegal.

But ignorance is no defence - you have to pay the tax.

People often ask me "why can't tax avoidance be made illegal"?

It's a good question. I recently tried quite hard to make one of the worst kinds of tax avoidance illegal. I think I got it wrong.

Thread: Imagine it's 2010. I've just invented a tax avoidance scheme.

Sign here, pay me £10k, and I'll throw £100k in a big circle and you can claim you just made a £100k tax loss from films/real estate/R&D/whatever, which you can deduct against your income.

(THIS DOES NOT WORK)

This is so dumb

1. There are under 200 billionaires in the UK. If they all sell their houses, the impact on the property market will be *tiny*.

2. But why would they sell? They probably spend only a few months here now. If they become non-resident they’ll spend a bit less.

https://twitter.com/eddieburfi/status/1978923547725594980

Much media discussion of “will they leave?” badly misunderstands this.

Very wealthy people have multiple houses in multiple countries. “Leaving” would in most cases be a small lifestyle change.

They’re not selling their Mayfair townhouse.

The intellectual shallowness of wealth tax proponents is something to behold.

https://twitter.com/patmillsuk/status/1978829502923809247

The Wealth Tax Commission was a serious undertaking. They published a lengthy paper and *seven* background papers on valuation.

Valuation problems were one of the key reasons the Commission recommended *against* an annual wealth tax.

Big development on our July storyabout a dodgy tax relief claim by Dundee United and tax firm ZLX.

The club made a huge claim for R&D tax relief which said that 24% of the players' time, and 80% of the chef's time, was spent on "research and development".

Not credible. ZLX denied the document had been sent to HMRC (but then why was it prepared and signed?).

Dundee United's FD denied signing it. But his electronic signature was on it.

A report in the Courier has two big developments: thecourier.co.uk/fp/sport/footb…

Who benefits from the abolition of stamp duty land tax?

The first answer: people buying very expensive homes. Average saving for someone buying a £10m+ home is £1.7m. Average saving for someone buying a £250k-£500k home is £5k. The second, truer, answer: people who currently own very expensive homes.

The evidence is that stamp duty is economically paid by sellers - it reduces property prices.

(I went through the evidence for that here ) taxpolicy.org.uk/2024/06/09/sta…

Lots of people asking about the Government's prospects for recovering the £120m from Barrowman/Mone/their companies

Short answer: I don't know. I'm not an insolvency specialist. No clue how the £120m was paid out to them from PPE Medpro

So I have no technical answer

But... (The background: PPE Medpro itself is in administration, with almost no cash to its name. So no money is coming from it - and the question is whether the Government can pursue the money elsewhere.)

Douglas Barrowman and Michelle Mone's company, PPE Medpro, has just been ordered to refund the Government £122m from a PPE contract.

There are two very odd things about PPE Medpro that may affect the odds of the Government ever getting that £122m...

Thread: The first odd thing: there two PPE Medpros.

One incorporated in the UK. The other incorporated in the Isle of Man. Both Barrowman-linked companies.

When Keir Starmer gave a field to his parents, he used a "life interest trust". This meant that, as its value grew from £20k to £300k, it was outside their inheritance tax estate.

How did this work? And was it tax avoidance?

🧵 I've been working on the story with @Gabriel_Pogrund and the Sunday Times for some time. Their story is here: thetimes.com/uk/politics/ar…

Is Andy Burnham right? Is there "definitely a case" for reintroducing the 50p tax rate? The top ("additional") rate was 50p from 2010 to 2013, on income over £150k.

The additional rate was cut to 45p from 2013.

NEW: Britain’s fiercest libel firm, Carter-Ruck, acted for the $4bn OneCoin fraud and threatened its critics. Now they’re being prosecuted at the SDT.

Their response? An anonymity order to cover it up. But Carter-Ruck just lost that order - and it's all coming out.

Thread
We’re publishing everything - the background, the filings, the timeline: taxpolicy.org.uk/2025/09/18/car…

What happens when you pay a fortune for tax advice from someone, and the advice turns out to be incompetent? And HMRC demands the tax back plus penalties?

If you guessed "you get all your money back" then I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed. Dodgy R&D tax firm ZLX made large research and development tax credit claims for its clients, charging a 30% fee. Often these claims had no legitimate basis