THERESA May has been accused of failing to properly stop the rich using loopholes to avoid paying taxes, despite promising to do just that when she became Prime Minister.
SNP MP Alison Thewliss has written to the Tory leader urging her to use the Paradise Paper scandal, the leak of 13.4m documents from banks in Bermuda and Singapore, as a catalyst to “create a tax system that works for everyone.”
The Glasgow politician’s letter comes as the latest revelations from the leaked documents suggest the owners of the St Enoch shopping centre in her constituency used perfectly legal tax dodges to avoid paying millions in stamp duty and corporate taxes.
Private equity group Blackstone, which bought the centre in 2013, said its investments were “wholly compliant with UK tax laws”.
The data suggests Blackstone’s tax structures allowed it to avoid stamp duty of £7.6m and corporate tax on up to £10m annual rental income on the £190m deal.
The St Enoch centre, along with Chiswick Park in London, were already held in Jersey-based unit trusts when Blackstone bought them.
The firm effectively created new Luxembourg companies, to buy over the site as a “collective investment schemes” – something to which a number of investors had contribute - and therefore avoid stamp duty
According to reports, money for the deal came from Blackstone’s property funds in the form of profit participating loans, which are treated as a debt by the recipient, but equity by the lending company.
The recipient can offset interest on repayments against profit to reduce the amount of tax paid, while the lender can treat the interest paid as dividends.
George Turner, from the Tax Justice Network, told the BBC: “What they are doing is buying into the trust so when the original owners sold the property to Blackstone, then they weren’t selling the property itself.
“They were selling an interest in the trust that owns the property and because that trust is owned offshore, they can avoid stamp duty.”
Profit from rental income at the St Enoch Centre, one of Scotland’s biggest malls, had normally been about £10m a year.
But in some years, just a few thousand pounds of tax appears to have been paid by the Blackstone Luxembourg companies owning St Enoch.
Thewliss said: “If the Prime Minister is genuinely committed to this, she must turn hollow rhetoric and inaction into action with rigorous regulation that holds to account the wealthiest from exploiting offshore tax havens.”
She added: “Taxpayers in the UK have faced seven years of callous, ideologically driven austerity, as this Tory government removes the safety net from those who need it most. The government cannot sit on its hands, as the UK heads for the biggest increase in inequality since the Thatcher years.”
Yesterday, yet more big names were revealed as using offshore entities to reduce their tax bill.
The names of celebrities Madonna, Shakira, Justin Timberlake and Nicole Kidman all appeared in the leaked documents.
There is nothing illegal about moving money offshore and nothing to suggest that any of those named were doing so unlawfully.
The details come from a leak of 13.4m files from two offshore service providers and the company registries of 19 tax havens.
They were obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists with partners including the Guardian, the BBC and the New York Times.
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