Vocal Voices

It turns out that he bought shares in his fathers offshore fund for £12,497 and sold them just before becoming PM for £31,500 when they were below the level at which capital gains tax would be levied.

John Mann, MP, has called for his resignation, and there are other rumblings.

Watch this space.

I wonder how many more of them are guilty.

Aggers wrote:I wonder how many more of them are guilty.

What of making a smart investment and selling it before capital gains?

You might as well ask how many people are guilty of swapping their primary property before selling their second one. Thus denying the government tens of billions of £. Possibly even enough to reduce the deficit to £0.

Apparently it was wrong for the MP's to do this. It's not only the rich or middle classes who have done this. People who are not wealthy, have their own home and inherit from their parents under the CG threshold have also done this. It is advised by any solicitor worth their salt.

This is a very murky area where people from all walks of life have "avoided" taxes. Most notably the MP's themselves who took hundreds of millions of £ directly out of the government funds in "expenses" then used the same laws to take those expenses as direct funds into their bank accounts.

Any MP who demands Cameron stands down because he used the laws to carry out a smart financial transaction is playing Austerity politics and nothing else.

Tell me he deliberately set up a fund offshore himself in full knowledge that it was illegal and he would gain from it illegally and I'll go with the "guilty" statement. Remember it is Cameron who has reduced the tax burden on the people of the UK and put the economy back on it's feet which benefits every single person living in the UK. I haven't seen anything illegal yet. I've only seen rhetoric.

Suff wrote:

Aggers wrote:I wonder how many more of them are guilty.

What of making a smart investment and selling it before capital gains?

Absolutely this - Suff is right, it's an entirely legal investment and sale. In fact, I've seen it said that it wasn't an "offshore trust", it was actually an OEIC (open-ended investment company), exactly like a unit trust. I've held money in an OEIC as well as unit trusts in my time, including holding them as ISAs. There's probably other VVers out there who have done the same. All totally above board.

Quarmby said that describing Blairmore Holdings as an “offshore trust” was misleading. It is an investment company, he said.
I think there is a massive misunderstanding about what he has invested in. And can you not ever use the term “offshore trust” again in relation to this investment. It’s not an offshore trust. It is an open-ended investment company which was incorporated in Panama and is resident in Ireland. A trust suggests something private, something that families use to hide money. It is not a trust. It is a company which is designed for investment.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/blo ... itics-live
Post timed at 11:12 a.m.

Cameron, it appears, sold his holding before the gains reaching the CGT (capital gains tax) threshhold. Again, perfectly acceptable. I'd have done exactly the same, except that my investments had a greater propensity to "bomb" than make money ....

This is a total hot-air "braying politicians / outraged media" story. Some of the media-darlings jumping on the bandwagon to attack Cameron (i.e. Sturgeon, Lucas) had better be sure their current attitudes don't come back to bite them in the future .....

After all we'd want a complete idiot who had no idea how to manage money running the budget wouldn't we????

Oh, sorry, we've done that in recent decades haven't we.... Only borrow to invest indeed!!! OOPs banks bust, government bust, economy bust...

But it did make good noise and politics at the time.

I thought the whole point of this sort of financial dealing was tax avoidance or tax evasion.
Whichever it was, it's all the same to me. My dictionary tells me that avoidance is evasion.
and if legislation could be changed to conform with this definition, that would put an end
to this unsavoury business.

Suff wrote:After all we'd want a complete idiot who had no idea how to manage money running the budget wouldn't we????

No, we've already got one in No 10.

Two camps have formed.

There are those who think this is all hot air and will blow over.

Reluctantly, I am in this camp. If a person has money to invest and does so within the law then that is their right. If they then pat tax on any dividends, that is also right. Cameron appears to have done both and, therefore, acted within the law.

Then there are those calling him a hypocrite.

And I am in this camp as well.

He held units for 13 years and paid income tax on the dividends. We do not know how much but it is a fair bet the dividends were better than those available onshore. Not that that is wrong, so why hide it?

He had benefited from a tax avoidance scheme while publicly denouncing them as PM. Then, due to some high profile cases, tax avoidance and evasion became a political cause célèbre and he was the leading evangelical in the fight against. Hypocrisy and double-standards spring to mind.

He will probably survive, but I suspect that is because many MPs will be looking at their own portfolios and wondering if they are "clean" enough to launch an attack without being attacked themselves.

If I recall he was against people who were incorporating themselves offshore then using extremely aggressive avoidance practises, used by global businesses, to avoid paying as much as 30% on the taxation on their core income. At the time that would have reduced them from 50% to 20%. Or, in other words, to pay as much tax as everyone else who was not a higher tax earner.

This is not the same as paying tax on dividend but avoiding corporation tax on withdrawing the capital...

I know a lot of people can't understand the distinction but Cameron has never, so far as we are aware, aggressively avoided paying tax on his core income. Those he was campaigning against were.

The press, as usual, is trying to blur the lines in order to get at him. Something they have done from the very first day he took office as PM.

I think Cameron will be OK. Damaged in the short term, but OK because he hasn't done anything illegal.

Because there are an awful lot of people with off shore accounts or investments, and I have no doubt at all that some of them sit on the opposition benches.