Exclusive: Whitehall tax avoidance “scam” revealed

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Flashy Student Loan Co HQ where Ed Lester works without being taxed at source. Pic courtesy BBC

Civil servants could be able to avoid legally paying tens of thousands of tax while working in Whitehall. An investigation by Exaro News and BBC Newsnight based on documents obtained by me through a Freedom of Information request has revealed an extraordinary personal tax deal negotiated by the Student Loan Company for its £182,000 a year Whitehall boss, Ed Lester. The deal is £140,000 salary,£14,000  bonus, £28,000 pension and £28,000 expenses for flight and Glasgow flat.

Documents released by the SLC and the Department of Business,Innovation and Skills reveal that Mr Lester, chief executive,pays no tax or national insurance at source but instead the SLC pay a consulting firm called Penna who pass the gross cash to a personal service company run by Mr Lester and a partner. This arrangement was approved by HM Revenue and Customs and the deal was signed off by David Willetts, the universities minister, and Danny Alexander, chief secretary to the Treasury.

As a result instead of paying tax at the top rate of 50 per cent – the company is likely to only have to pay corporation tax at the government’s new lower small company rate of 21 per cent and minimal national insurance. Mr Lester has declined to discuss the matter with Newsnight or Exaro News.

Full and extensive details are revealed in a series of articles on the Exaro News website (http://www.exaronews.com) – behind a pay wall but if you register  it is free for a week – or you can see the film about it on BBC Newsnight.

The investigation has forced Mr Alexander into ordering a  Whitehall wide inquiry to find out how many civil servants are benefitting from the same secret deals.  The reason is that ministers  DONT’ KNOW  and it looks like in Mr Willetts’ case DON’T CARE.  Alexander personally examined each top pay contract and now admits he missed the tax implications of this particular deal.

Whatever his inquiry reveals this arrangement looks to me on a par with all the recent scandals involving banker’s bonuses and Sir Fred the Shred’s stripped honours. Basically you as a taxpayer are paying the state to negotiate a deal for a very highly paid  official to avoid tax. This can’t be fair, right or decent to millions of low paid public and private sector workers who are paying a big whack in tax and can’t set up personal service companies – effectively to avoid paying tax. It also has the added insult that the man who has got this deal is pursuing every single student in the UK to make sure they pay every penny back of their student loan.

Dole queues – What dole queues? The huge divide among the unemployed

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Dole queues -growing rapidly in Labour, falling in some Tory and Lib seats Pic:courtesy Daily Mail

Ever wondered why with  dole queues at their highest levels since 1996, in many areas pubs and restuarants are heaving, the West End theatres full and motorways crowded with traffic? The answer is provided in an extraordinary analysis by the House of Commons Library of the latest claimant figures released by the government (see http://bit.ly/x6wWxw).

Far from  the picture painted by David Cameron’s infamous slogan ” We are in it together” the United Kingdom is as divided over who is on the dole and who isn’t as it is over bankers’ bonuses and public sector worker pay freezes. And it is not just the differences between the disproportionate numbers of young people-under 24- on the dole and an older generation in work.

It is  the fact that across  the nation the number of people claiming job seekers’ allowance is now dividing area against area and becoming party political. Put it simply the government – whether it intended to or not – is dumping on areas that voted Labour and leaving many coalition seats- Liberal Democrat and Conservative alike – completely unscathed from the grim dole reaper. In fact -taken year on year in some Tory and Lib Dem seats unemployment claims are, believe it or not, actually FALLING.

Am I making this up?  No it is all in the report. The Commons library report looks at dole claimants and breaks them down by constituency -taking as its base the economically active – those aged between 16 and 64 – and working out how many people in the constituency are unemployed.

It then ranks them all. The top 15 dole  constituencies-with the exception of three- are all Labour seats. And the other three are in Northern Ireland. The bottom 15 are all Conservative or Liberal Democrat. And the difference is stark . In Labour held Birmingham,Ladywood, – the Number One seat for dole claims- more than one in five people are claiming. In Liberal Democrat held West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine, the figure is 1 in 100 and falling for the long term unemployed.

Among prominent politicians John Redwood and David Cameron both have miniscule numbers on the dole- and the overall jobless claims are falling in Redwood’sconstituency despite a rise in youth unemployment. While Liam Byrne, the shadow works and pension secretary, and ex union leader Jack Dromey have some of the highest. There is more on this in an article by me and Rajeev Syal on the Guardian Society website (see http://bit.ly/xvUv8M ) and by me in Tribune (http://bit.ly/z3dAhM).

Perhaps it can be best illustrated by comparing Liam Byrne constituency with Chris Grayling, the Secretary of State for Works and Pensions.

Liam Byrne’s Birmingham Hodge Hill  seat has the second highest number of dole claimants in the UK with 7257  claiming benefits – 1750 for over a year – and a rise of 723 – 250 on the long term register.

Chris Grayling in Epsom and Ewell has  1007 on the dole – an increase of 44 in a year – with a rise of just 5 people out of work for a year -to just 135.

No wonder perhaps the dole queues do not have the same resonance for the Tories  as Labour. Tory Mps’ surgeries are hardly going to be packed with desperate people looking for jobs – but Labour Mps are going to be overwhelmed. It also has a political impact and might be one reason why Labour is not capitalising on the recession- simply because in some areas it does not exist.

The most interesting point is that Lord Young’s much criticised statement about people never having it so good – is actually true in some Tory areas.

Labour is going to have try much harder to get the point of the horror of the dole queues across to a wider general public – because as it stands the Tories seem to have manipulated a recession that concentrates almost entirelyon their constituencies and affects mainly their voters.

Brian Coleman: “Human Rights-My Backside!”

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Brian Coleman - no to human rights

Tory councillor Brian Coleman – standing for election again this May as London Assembly Conservative member for Barnet and Camden – is at it again!

 In an interview for a foreign TV station he is making it clear again that he wants stringent controls over everybody who blogs on the internet – after the failed ” complaint” by his local council Barnet to try and get local blogger Derek Dishman fined and registered under the Data Protection Act for publishing public details about the views of Barnet officials on their own websites. If successful Barnet would have prevented bloggers writing anything about anyone except their own family and housemates -without being licenced by the DPA.

In an extraordinary interview – see www.youtube.com/watchv=0uuj1il43xg&feature=youtu.be  the councillor demands censorship and libel action against bloggers- and evidently beleives they don’t have right to criticise him or anyone else without bweing taken to court.

 What is worse it appears after this youtube except was put up on the website t00manycuts.blogspot.com  followed a comment on Twitter Mr Coleman successfully moved to have the authors removed from their Twitter account. I don’t quite know what  the tweet said but it was not flattering and it may to do with the fact that he is living a subsidised Methodist housing charity flat while claiming £128,000 a year council allowances from four authorities and organisations.

Coleman has never responded to the accusations – but always been happy to condemn poorer people who complain about rising rents.

 Curious to know what David Cameron, Grant Shapps ( the local government minister) and Boris Johnson might think of his views on human rights and the internet. But if you are planning to vote for him, he is obviously standing on a platform of removing human rights from all Barnet and Camden citizens. Great platform for a democracy!

 Let him know  your views on this> he is contactable on

toomanycuts.blogspot.com

Blog review 2011: Who came, saw and commented

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The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

This blog was viewed about 67,000 times in 2011. This compared with 17,000 in 2010 – the year the blog was launched.Click here to see the complete report.

Still Not Quite A Great Swiss Rail Journey

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Wintry Bernina Express Pic: courtesy Daily Mail

Since this blog was written Great Rail Journeys have not used the Ambassador Hotel in Brig. The Swiss private equity company ‘s new brochure shows they plan to use it again for Christmas. I would not recommend staying there -particularly over Xmas to avoid disappointment.

I am also reblogging this following revelations that up to £13 trillion is diverted by wealthy individuals to tax havens. The ultimate owners of Great Rail Journeys are in the Jersey tax haven and are directly connected to a Swiss Luxembourg bank which has links to taxhavens across the world from the Caymans to the Ukraine.

I can’t quite resist  going off piste and writing an evaluation of taking a break this Christmas – going with my wife Margaret on an organised rail trip to Switzerland in search of snow. Run by Great Railway Journeys (more later), a well-known up market travel company, parts of the trip equalled expectations. Going over the Bernina pass by rail and the train journey to Zermatt,  and staying in a quaint  wood panelled hotel in Chur, the Romantik Hotel Stern, in the 16th century old town, were magical.

The tour guide, a Lancashire lass, Sue Fairweather (employed independently by GRJ) was a brilliant people manager, well organised, yet allowing its mainly elderly travellors a lot of freedom, and participating in a particularly raucous Christmas Day gala dinner, where some of the alcohol consumed could have rivalled revellers in Magaluf.

But the trip had two jarring features. Despite two firm assurances before we left from the company that the hotels could easily cope with a lactose free diet for my wife – it became obvious that they couldn’t and a hotel in Brig  that left so much to be desired that I think it should  lose its contract.

This led me to do a little journalistic investigation into Great Rail Journeys – particularly after some of the more seasoned travellers pointed out  that each year the company has cut down on what it offered but not what it charged. Examples are dropping the odd inclusive dinner and cutting down a free Swiss rail pass – to a free Swiss half rail pass.

Great Rail Journeys markets itself as a 30-year-old British specialist travel company based in York. It was until 2005. Now it is owned by a private equity group called Primary Capital through the Amber Travel Partnership. Investors in London-based Primary Capital have no  particular interest in rail holidays, the company is merely part of a portfolio which also includes the cafe chain, Coffee Republic, and the seed merchant, Thompson and Morgan.

But the private equity company don’t even own GRJ. The parent company in Primary Capital is EFG Reads Trust Company Ltd, an offshore family trust based in Jersey. It has 400,000 shares to 96,000 held by others. According to its annual accounts Primary Capital paid no corporation tax in Britain in 2009 and 2010 setting previous losses against money due to the UK Treasury and its accounts show that £1m of its income is not subject to British tax. Yet it managed a £1.3m dividend pay out in 2010.

But the trail does not end in Jersey. It turns out the family trust company are advisers to EFG, a Luxembourg and Zurich based bank with a telephone list of subsidiaries from the Cayman Islands to the Ukraine. Unfortunately for investors it is still in Greece, though it has tried to pull back over the Eurozone crisis.

So far from your holiday money going to a British company it eventually lands up going into the pockets of what the late Harold Wilson famously called (probably politically incorrect now) the ” gnomes of Zurich.”

Ambassador Hotel Brig: Not as good as it looks, don’t stay. Pic courtesy venere.com

As for the unhappy experience in the hotel, the Ambassador in Brig,(see http://bit.ly/vJRWTW ) its owner did not live up to the niceties of its name. He undiplomatically warned the 34 people on the tour  during his welcoming speech against putting critical comments on tripadviser in case it damaged the reputation of his hotel. (don’t say this in front  of a journalist!)

Not content with that they were – unless reminded by our tour organiser – hopeless at organising a non dairy diet – to the point of denying there was cheese in a course when it was on the menu in English and German!

The so-called “recently refurbished rooms” would have done credit to a mediocre tatty English b&b, just ticking the boxes on the facilities, but leaving you with not enough room to swing a Swiss cat in the shower. If there were any refurbished rooms, it must have one done up for the brochure!

The food if you weren’t on a non dairy diet was good. If you have a lot of spare cash in Brig  the a la carte menu was mouth-watering but very expensive, easy to spend £100 a head. Whether it deserved its food gold star from GRJ is a different matter.

My advice is that if you want to book a future GRJ holiday that includes this hotel at Brig, don’t go!

But it was the exception. We came across a remarkable atmospheric restaurant in a 1522 inn in Chur, the Hofkellerei, with a  brilliant three course meal including local  meat specialities for £30 a head.

And an amazing world-class art, archaeology, sculpture park and classic car museum created by a Swiss philanthropist, the Foundation Pierre Gianadda, where Henry Moores, Rodins, Cezanne and Picassos rubbed shoulders with unique Roman bronzes and historic Bugattis, all in the tiny town of Martigny in the Valais. see their website at http://www.gianadda.ch .

More Revelations after Christmas

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A seasonal Xmas Picture: courtesy http;//email-junk.com/wallpaper

It is time for a Christmas break. Thanks to all followers  and viewers who have read this blog over the past year.

Normal service will resume after Christmas with fresh investigations in the pipeline  including one on a leading Labour councillor. There may also be further revelations about the life  and wealth of Francis Maude as the government in the season of good cheer ratchets up its campaign to increase pension contributions from teachers, civil servants, firefighters,probation officers, health workers and local government staff while cutting their benefits.

Francis Maude is  the first national figure subject to an armchair audit on this blog – part of the open society which he and David Cameron say they are keen to promote.

Also expect some suprising and fascinating revelations about Whitehall.

In the meantime have a good festive break while you can afford it.

Maude’s Tory Madrassa: The House of the Rising Spads

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Come into the garden,Maude. leafy outlook at Denny Garden - a tenant's perk

This is the second part of the Armchair Audit of Francis Maude -looking at his role as a landlord.

Not only can Mr Maude look forward to a platinum pension  from investment bankers, Morgan Stanley, (see previous blog) but he is  also making money as a  landlord in Kennington, south London by letting out rooms available only to young  ambitious Tories.

Just off the Kennington Road where he once lived lies Denny Crescent, a beautiful and leafy enclave in a somewhat grotty  area.

Here Mr Maude purchased  a home for £240,000 cash in 1999. The  three bedroomed property, one of a terrace, has more than doubled in value since then – a next door home was recently sold  for £485,000 – and boasts two special  features.

One is  a restricted covenant signed between Mr Maude and as the title-deed shows ” His Royal Highness Charles Philip Arthur George Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall, Rothesay,Earl of Chester, Carrick,Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles and Great Steward of Scotland.”  Originally it was owned by the  Duchy of Cornwall which has imposed restrictions.

Mr Maude’s  terraced home  is Grade II listed. Lambeth Council’s description describes the  terrace as built in  “1913 by J D Coleridge for Duchy of Cornwall Estate. Crescent of 2-storey red brick cottages in Dutch style. Dark tiled roofs with dividing chimney walls and moulded wood eaves cornice. Returned crowstepped gables, with Roman cement coping, at ends and flanking centre. First floor brick band. Sash windows with glazing bars in moulded wood architraves. Half glazed doors in plain wood frames have low oblong fanlight. Handsome rainwater heads with Prince of Wales’ feathers and motto. ”

The second is membership for £125 a year and use of a private garden for his tenants, Denny Garden Ltd, opposite his home. You can find out all about this at http://dennygarden.wordpress.com.

EXPENSES SCANDAL

This property featured in the Daily Telegraph’s expenses scandal. It was the family’s London home – the electoral register shows Francis, Christina, and two of his daughters  Julia and Cecily, lived there until 2006.

Then Mr Maude  and his family swapped homes to a flat in nearby Imperial Court taking out a £345,000 mortgage and began claiming  substantial Parliamentary expenses on the flat. They charged the taxpayer £387.50 for moving the furniture from Denny Crescent there.

What the title deeds reveal is that Mr Maude also took out another mortgage with the HSBC Private Bank  on Denny Crescent raising another tranche of cash.

Mr Maude’s “tax efficiency” as they call it  is clever – at the time he claimed  interest on one mortgage from the taxpayer and offset new rental income from Tory activists in his old home  by loading all the mortgage  interest costs and repairs against the rental charge. That way he pays little tax.  And he has released hundreds of thousands of pounds of capital to spend himself. No wonder he is a highly paid former investment banker.

The property unlike next door – where the tenant pays Prince Charles’s Duchy of Cornwall  £500 a month for the unfurnished house – is not registered as a  fair rent.

MAUDE’S TORY MADRASSA

Westminster gossip  among Tory Spads ( the name for political advisers to ministers) has it that the only way you can get a convenient place to lay your head at the Maude address is to be vetted by his daughters. No chance if you are not a rising Tory activist, preferably a special adviser or wannabe MP. It also ensures no indiscretions to outsiders at the dinner table. Some wag described it as “Maude’s madrassa”.

True or not Mr Maude has had both  infamous and rising stars as his tenants.

Maude's most infamous tenant: James McGrath Pic courtesy: Daily Telegraph

 Chief among them is Australian James McGrath, a  40 something strategic adviser to Boris Johnson.

 He was exposed by journalist and campaigner Marc Wadsworth for suggesting that black immigrants who were unhappy with living in a London run by Boris Johnson should go home (See Guardian comment  is free  http://bit.ly/sWjUCq). Despite being close to Lynton Crosby( now masterminding Boris’s campaign again) he was forced to quit and he ended up going home to Australia where he is campaigns director for the Liberal Party. He has threatened to return.  In an interview with Shane Greer in Total Politics,(see http://bit.ly/sN4Sgd ) he said: ” I might come back here, we’ll see what happens.

Shane: Who knows, maybe the Boris re-election?

James: “Maybe actually, that would be nice actually especially if Ken runs again. No worries.”

Shane: “Good to stick it to him?”

James: “Totally.”

Less controversial is Martha Varney, Maude’s tenant until 2010, but a rising star,in her late 20s / eraly 30s and now special adviser to  eccentric bin dumper Oliver Letwin, who works with Francis Maude, in the Cabinet Office.  She is paid between £40,000-£54,000 a year.

Even less well-known is Alistair Richardson, in his late 20s, another Tory wannabe who has written blogs for Platform10, urging in 2o08 that MPs  (now on £65,000) should be paid at least £100,000 a year.

There are also  people not on the public electoral register. So which rising Tory star will kip at Maude’s listed home next?

Francis Maude powers site hits to 80,000+

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Thanks to all who read my tale on Francis Maude’s gold plated pension. The number of hits is 1671  so far – most in the 48 hours after the story went up. Special thanks to Political Scrapbook who made it their main story for a couple of days, Hugh Muir at the Guardian Diary who wrote up the tale in the paper and Jonathen Ledger, general secretary at NAPO, plus the 25 or more of you who liked the tale so much that you retweeted it- fromRichard Simcox at the  Public and Commercial Services Union, Barnet bloggers,to cityalan, a professor at City University.

There is more on Maude to come soon -watch this space.

Exclusive: Francis Maude’s secret gold plated banker’s pension

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Francis Maude: The man with the gold plated pension. Pic courtesy: The Guardian

Armchair audit is  raising its sights. As well as looking as councillors like Brian Coleman, it is now turning the spotlight  on auditing the  seriously wealthy to see if they follow David Cameron’s dictum that we are in it all together.

Francis Maude is the public face for taking on the public sector trade unions and  insisting their low paid members are being offered the best possible  pension terms which anyone in the private sector will be really envious.

But is everyone in the private sector worse off than public sector workers? Not Mr Maude for a start.

He has taken one hit and is about to take another since he rejoined the Conservative led coalition.

His  Cabinet Office minister salary  is £98,740 (includes MP’s salary of £65,738). This is a reduction of £5197 on his Labour predecessor, Tessa Jowell.

It is his pension history which marks the real divide. When he reaches retirement age at 2018 he will be able – unlike his public sector colleagues –  to be able to draw FOUR pensions.

 He will get the state pension – promised by the coalition to reach £140 a week – which will go to everybody.

He will get  TWO public sector pensions – one as an MP and one as minister. Their arrangements are hideously complicated – and not as open as figures available for public sector workers.

As an MP  since 1983 of 28 years standing ( he was out of parliament between 1992-97) by 2015 he will entitled – assuming a virtual wage freeze – to a pension of around £31,000 a year because he has a private sector pension and this taken into consideration to save taxpayer’s cash. Otherwise it would be worth over £46,000.

But while workers will be paying higher pension contributions Mr Maude is able to pay less under this deal. His contribution rate drops from 7.9 per cent to 5.9 per cent.

His minister’s pension by 2015 will be worth over £10,000 a year. His contributions, to be fair, are now 11.9 per cent and will rise to 18 per cent.

This gives him a state pension in excess of £40,000 a year – TEN times the average pension of lower paid civil servants bearing the brunt of the cuts and FIVE times the average civil servant pension. For that matter it is also FIVE times the average teacher’s pension.

But this is by no means the full picture. These calculations  miss out Mr Maude’s private pension – which is a huge elephant in the negotiating room.

 During the period he was out of office Mr Maude was director of  27 companies between 1992 and 2011. Six were dissolved and three went bust.

 But standing out from the lot is a period of over two years from February 1994 to November 1996 when Mr Maude was managing director of  investment bankers,Morgan Stanley, in London and New York.

The accounts are still available at Companies House and the salaries – paid in 1990s money – were stratospheric for directors.

The highest paid director’s salary went from £786,873  in 1994 to £1,234,690 in 1995 and to £1,708, 063  in 1996 – a rise  of well in excess of 100 per cent. And that excludes pension payments.

Mr Maude’s salary is not  identified –  but as MD in two countries – it will be nearer to those  figures – plus a pension to boot.

 The Cabinet Office declined to comment on his private pensions arrangements. But a City management consultant told me:

“It would be inconceivable that Morgan Stanley would not have paid Mr Maude a high pension because it is a much more tax efficient way of paying out money. Often City firms offer pensions equivalent to say 10 years service, rather than three, as a way of giving more money to people when they leave.”

Indeed Mr Maude had a lot of spare cash in 1996. Land registry records reveal that on 1st August 1996 Mr Maude and his wife Christina, bought for cash a large farmhouse and land at  Dial Post in West Sussex.  Property around there with land goes now for sums well in excess of £1m.

Perhaps the time has come for Mr Maude to reveal his true pension status when he is lecturing people to settle for less for life. He is the Government’s Mr Transparency and has released lots of personal data on individual civil servant’s  pay and pensions.

Just this weekend, his boss at the Cabinet Office, Nick Clegg, called for more transparency on top executive pay and perks. Mr Maude could lead by example by revealing the historic facts of his secret pension deal.

 My guess is that he has a private fund worth well over £1m on top of his three other state pensions. Prove me wrong, Mr Maude.

You can of course express your own views – you might feel Francis Maude is worth a mega pension, or you may feel he doesn’t  deserve anything like it.. You can e-mail him on psfrancismaude@cabinet-office.x.gsi.gov.uk .

Does churnalism damage your wealth ( and your pension)?

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Nigel Lawson: A Euro take on dangers of churnalism.Pic courtesy Daily Telegraph

I am not a natural fan of Nigel Lawson. I didn’t agree with his slashing the higher tax rate when he was chancellor. I don’t agree with his views on climate change. I am sceptical of his Eurosceptism. (though I think there is a major democratic deficit in the EU).

Yet in an interview  I did for Exaro News (see http://bit.ly/vOq5Ap ) he makes a rather clever observation about the relationship between the current  market turbulence and the standard of reporting by journalists.

 He says the combination of  superficial reaction by the markets to the growing crisis in the Eurozone and the unquestioning nature of  journalists covering current financial events in Europe is making a bad situation incredibly worse.

What he says is that journalists  reporting the recent crisis in Greece and Italy – produce instant reports to meet a 24/7 agenda that are superficial and proved wrong within 48 hours.  The practice of this press release journalism – known as churnalism – is brilliantly dissected by my friend Guardian hack Nick Davies in his book Flat Earth News.

The market traders – equally superficial also working to that  same punishing 24/7 schedule believe the press headlines and make equally wrong calls – pushing shares, currencies and debt interest rates up and down like a yo-yo.

You might say so what – it’s only a game played by a load of overpaid market gamblers and equally (sometimes) overpaid superficial hacks. But there is a very serious point.

With the demise of the final salary and public sector pension – hundreds of millions of people are relying on their future wealth and happiness on investments made by these people to fund their lifestyle in their old age.

 It does not help anybody but the most extreme speculators that these are now subject to such superficial judgements and reporting. The losers are the general public, you and me, who could have even lower returns from market madness.

 Lawson’s point suggests the need for some mature market traders. It also makes the case for the relevance of  real journalism and proper analysis. Another good reason why we need good reporters who have time to think and look beyond superficial statements and gloss  made by politicians, both in the media and the blogosphere. Otherwise it could cost us a lot of money.

Incidently he also has the opposite view  to George Osborne, the present Tory chancellor, about what  should happen to the Euro ( this article is at http://bit.ly/t79TJV )