In the news

making the owner richest person in the world

Rather than trying to tax corporations, which always seems hard as they spend a lot of time avoiding, we could just tax wealth. 1% of your wealth goes to the exchequer each year? Don't care if it is property, shares or gold, if you own it you pay. If you have to sell something then get selling. Probably with an option to put a charge on your home, a bit like a mortgage.

Wouldn't people just move the ownership of their goods to a company or trust set up for the purpose, registered in one of the overseas territories?

Do both.

Probably for some assets but not property (if you don't pay the state seizes and sells it). If the only thing it did was reduce the value of UK property a bit then it would be worthwhile if you ask me.

If there was the will, then most overseas territories/tax havens could be brought into line

You can already live in a UK property that is bought with untaxed funds from an offshore company/vehicle. You'd need to close that loophole first.

How? The EU has made some good steps in that direction but the UK has nothing left to bargain with?

EU could do more. USA could close down Delaware if it wanted to. Legislation. We could put pressure on our own tax havens.

You can and you have to pay Council Tax but it is a trivial amount if you have a multimillion pound home. Make it a proportion of the value of the home and you change things.

But you'd pay CGT on the disposal. So that could potentially be a very expensive April.

I don't know what that means.

IIRC any entity selling a house is liable for Capital Gains Tax (assuming it's sold at a profit), unless the seller is a human and the house is their primary residence.

So the off-shore vehicle would be liable for CGT the individual would have avoided.

The offshore company owns the house and nothing else. You just buy and sell the offshore company instead. But it still gets really complicated with extra stamp duty, complicated CGT and apparently there is some kind of additional tax on property owned by offshore companies (although not a huge amount).

People are out there to help you manage your wealth. Bet they charge a decent fee and are worth it for the savings. Eg https://www.saffery.com/insights/publications/taxation-of-uk-residential-property/

Yeh isn't this what the Blair's got in the news via the Pandora papers for recently, buying a property in London that was in a offshore company but they were arguing that they weren't dodging stamp duty as they would incur capital gains

I think they also claimed that that was the only way of buying that property and they would sell it the usual way when they are done with it. Why they had to buy that property I'm not sure.

Capital gains tax is payable on the gain you make on certain assets and kicks in when you get rid of them, aka disposal. That applies to a sale or a gift.

So if you buy 100 shares for £100, they increase in value and then you gift them to your trust, you have to pay CGT on the increase.

That causes a cash flow issue. Given that most HNWIs tend to be cash poor IME it might not be as easy as you think. Could open up some sort of financing product though.

Couldn’t the company/trust just loan you the money back, in the same way that Mogg just took a “loan” instead of dividends? Tax free, nothing to see here.

In theory HMRC are going after individuals like that.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/loan-schemes-and-the-loan-charge-an-overview/tax-avoidance-loan-schemes-and-the-loan-charge

The offshore company owns the house and nothing else. You just buy and sell the offshore company instead. But it still gets really complicated with extra stamp duty, complicated CGT and apparently there is some kind of additional tax on property owned by offshore companies (although not a huge amount).

This. The upfront costs are larger, but that is the only point at which tax is captured. After that, it's an offshore shell game.

individuals like that.

I think it's a bit unfair to lump locum workers, agency nurses and construction contractors, most of whom thought they were doing the right thing*, even if naively, and were even pushed into the arrangements by their government employers, and someone who is taking out a loan against their of own £ #00,000,000 business, which will never be paid back and will drop into a tax free loophole at death, thereby also avoiding inheritance taxes.

* And who have also been caught by HMRC's egregious incompetence / underfunding / vindictiveness, giving them a second bite at the apple and the ability to retrospectively change tax laws.

What does Boris have on the editor of The Daily Express?

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Former NotW journo under Piers Morgan - so any number of things...

Desmond hasn't got his peerage yet.

I need to know more about those onions

As a company director I paid myself a salary sufficient to cover NI. The rest was paid as dividends, I allocated shares to my children and most of the dividends were paid in their names.

Net result, effectively zero tax.

Completely legal, if a little embarrassing in retrospect.

Still, on the basis of VAT on all personal expenditure I still paid 20% tax in reality.

It is true though, the relatively wealthy pay far less tax than the person paid by the hour.

For clarification I haven’t earned anything in reality since 2019 and haven’t claimed a penny from the state.