2941 days ago
In order to persuade us all that he has done nothing wrong David Cameron has published his tax papers going back to 2009. The only problem is that they demonstrate explicitly that he avoided paying tax ( £70,000of tax) by a legal sleight of hand. You and I would not only have not known about that trick but also not been in line to inherit the sort of vast sums that Cameron and his sisters inherited. We are the little people. We pay taxes at normal rates.
Cameron's old man left him £300,000 direct. That woukd be £300,000 of money from the Blairmore Trust where returns were increased by not having to pay tax becuase it was based offshore. And that money went to Call Me Dave tax free.
Most of Cameron's old man's cash went to Cameron's mum ( that would also be offshore cash as per the Panama Papers).
A few months after CMD picked up the £300,000 ( tax free because it was under the £325,000 IHT exemption limit), Mrs Cameron senior handed CMD
2945 days ago
I am not sure that this shows how "in touch" Mr David Cameron's Tories are with the zeitgeist but his former Attorney General Dominic Grieve MP does not want a hasty reaction to the Panama Papers because he thinks we must protect the, now threatened, species that is the offshore bankster.
Like many on the right, I find the idea that multi millionaires, like David Cameron's late father can pay sod all tax becuase they use offshore shell companies while folks like you and I pay the full whack a bit distasteful. It is sordid and patently unfair that "taxes are for little people". Conservatism should be about meritocracy and opportunity for all not just helping a small financial elite get even richer.
Of course one way to get the small super rich spivs back onshore is to lower UK tax rates and I am a big supporter of that.
But equally it does seem just wrong that crown colonies are allowing the uber rich to pay sweet FA and -as the Panama Papers make clear - to allow other rich folk to engage in money laundering. The former is distatsteful, the latter illegal.
Could we clamp down on what goes on in crown colonies like the BVI, Jersey and the Isle of Man? Yes we could. We could, for instance
