SONY’s new slim Playstation, bundled with a copy of Fifa 18 will, if you get it from Argos, cost £259. The same games console from high street chain BrightHouse costs £559.79. If it is acquired using a “rent-to-own” offer at £9 for 130 weeks it will, with interest, end up costing about £1170.00.
It’s the same with TVs, fridges, washing machines – Curry’s will charge you £279 for a model by Hoover that at BrightHouse costs £702.
The company targets those on low incomes, offering goods for helpfully small weekly amounts with loan-shark-likes rates of interest added on.
Last week the Financial Conduct Authority said BrightHouse had not been a “responsible lender” and ordered the firm to pay £14.8 million back to nearly 250,000 customers.
The regulator said the company simply had not properly assessed if the people to whom it was lending could effectively afford the debt.
BrightHouse is the trading name for Caversham Finance and is owned by private equity company Vision Capital, which according to the Paradise Papers – a leaked cache of 13.4 million documents from a bank in Bermuda – had been backed by the Dover Street VI Cayman Fund LP, in which the Duchy of Lancaster, the private estate of the Queen, had reportedly invested £5.73 million in 2005.
The leaked papers show the monarch invested £10m of her personal fortune in an offshore tax haven in the Cayman Islands and Bermuda between 2004 and 2005, though there is no suggestion she has acted illegally.
Asked if the Queen should apologise for the offshore investments, Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn told the CBI’s annual conference in London: “Well anyone that is putting money into tax havens in order to avoid taxation in Britain, and obviously investigations have to take place, should do two things – not just apologise for it but also recognise what it does to our society.
“Because if the very wealthy person wants to avoid taxation in Britain and therefore put money into a tax haven somewhere, who loses? Schools, hospitals, housing, all those public services lose and the rest of the population have to pay to cover up the deficit created by that.
“And so I think with the Paradise Papers, which I have been reading through like all of us this morning, are quite shocking.”
The Queen voluntarily pays tax on any income she receives from the Duchy, and her spokesman said she had not deliberately invested in BrightHouse.
A spokesman for the estate said: “We operate a number of investments and a few of these are with overseas funds. All of our investments are fully audited and legitimate.”
Also among those named in the papers so far are former Tory treasurer Lord Ashcroft; US president Donald Trump’s commerce secretary Wilbur Ross, who is reportedly linked to a Russian firm; and corporations Nike and Apple.
Corbyn has called for a public inquiry into aggressive tax avoidance.
Asked if she too wanted an inquiry, Theresa May told the CBI: “We have seen more revenues coming to HMRC over the last few years – since 2010, £160 billion extra that they have been able to raise.
“But we do work, there’s already work that’s been done to ensure that we see greater transparency in our dependencies and British overseas territories and we continue to work with them.”
During an urgent question in the House of Commons, the SNP’s Stewart Hosie asked the Treasury minister to bring more transparency into the system to let the public know “who is really behind the most trusted of brands”.
The Dundee MP added: “This tax avoidance is a driver of global inequality which runs to the very top of business, politics, entertainment, and the establishment in many countries.”
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