Tax Havens

rosesarered, I haven't read any accusations anywhere that Cameron has acted illegally. You seem to be missing the point and ignoring people's anger, as they suffer wage freezes, unemployment, zero hours contracts, lack of investment, cuts to benefits and public services, etc. They've put up with it, because they were told we all needed to tighten our belts and were told it was 'the right thing to do'. So what IS the right thing to do? The whole thing makes a mockery of being a 'striver' (not an skiver) and part of a 'hard working family'.

In any case, as I've written before, while people are treating the Cameron family as characters in a soap opera, I think this is a sideshow to the bigger picture, which isn't been addressed, although journalists such as Aditya Chakrabortty are beginning to address it.

This isn't the end of the story.

It makes them a government 'of the people' if enough voters have cast a vote for them.... Democracy.

rosesarered, Nonnie claimed MOST people have offshore shares. I don't believe she was 'spot on' at all - unless you can prove otherwise.

I actually agree with you about the 'bigger picture' and hope that some of it will be addressed.
When politicians say ' we are all in this together' we know that they themselves are well paid, and that a lot of people in this country are well paid too, we are not a whole nation on minimum wages or benefits.So it would be naive to expect us to all have the same standards of living, IMHO sayings like that are just meant to encourage people to have confidence in the government to get the deficit down.

A LOT of pensions are in off shore accounts. in fact when you pay into a pension you don't know where the money is going, but it is often put into accounts that maximise the profits.

Annie you don't have any ISAs, pensions or investments? In that case you probably don't have any offshore shares but most people do and my comment was about most people not any individual.

From that, I assumed that Nonnie meant that most people jave ISAs, pensions or investments - not that they all had offshore shares.

It's all in the interpretation of posts and how some wish to see a meaning that isn't there.

As you have just done Ana

No! It seems some people don't understand the difference between 'all', 'most' and 'some' nor do they check facts. Nothing at all to do with interpretation

Er...how do you know that Annie? Are you Nonnie? If not, your post means nothing.

Ana, can you not accept, all your posts mean nothing to me

Certainly, as long as you accept that yours mean nothing to me. Doesn't disallow me from posting, though.

" It is estimated that between 21 and 32 trillion dollars of private financial wealth is located, untaxed or lightly taxed, in tax havens around the world.

Illicit cross-border financial flows are estimated at more than £1 trillion dollars per year, ten times more than global foreign aid budgets combined. The Panama Papers leak is so large that if one printed the file the final document would be 650m pages long.

It is right that a special task force has been set up to go through the information that has been leaked. Hopefully charges will follow if criminality can be proven.

The public are indignant here and around the world. People are rightly angered by the different rules for normal tax-payers and a small ultra-rich elite.

But we must ask ourselves whether the scale of the problem has been taken seriously, because quite patently it has not been thus far domestically and internationally. The UK bears a particular responsibility given that the UK and its overseas territories collectively sit at the top of the Financial Secrecy Index of the Tax Justice Network."

Angus Robertson's reply to Cameron.

The bigger picture.

I've tried to find out what percentage of people have ISAs and/or private pensions. They all keep wanting to sell me one!

www.taxjustice.net/2016/04/11/the-panama-papers-are-not-about-tax/

www.taxjustice.net/2016/04/11/15578/

a paper by Oxfam about the number of companies investing World Bank money that use tax havens in their core business.

The bigger picture.

As I have no shares or pension and been told by Nonnie those who do not couldn't understand I will again be honest and ask a question I have asked several times , if tax is not being avoided in this country why the need to invest in off shore accounts ?

Well dodgy Dave said that it is to make use of dollars. ?

Did no-one tell him that perfectly good companies can open a dollar account whilst being sat in the UK?

In fact most do to take advantage of the exchange rate.

"When Ian Cameron died, David Cameron received £300,000 in his will. That’s just below the maximum amount you could, at the time, pass on free of inheritance tax. Most or all of the rest went to David’s mother and, because she was Ian’s wife, it went tax free. She promptly gifted the Prime Minister a further £200,000 by way of what Downing Street is describing as an equalisation payment (a payment to ‘equalise’ the money that the children received from their father).

That’s the real world. If she survives the gift by seven years that will save £70,000 compared with an alternative world in which the money went straight from Ian to David.

The mere fact of making gifts whilst you’re alive can – if you’re wealthy at least, because only a very few people are rich enough to pay inheritance tax – avoid inheritance tax. But I wouldn’t describe it, without more, as meaningful tax avoidance. It’s a rule that the statutory draftsman has created and you’re using it as she intended.

But what takes this little two-step into the realm of meaningful tax avoidance is that it would have been known before Ian’s death what sum David needed to get in Ian’s will to ensure he received the same amount from his father as his siblings.

The natural thing to do – and so to me the appropriate ‘counterfactual’ to what actually happened – would have been for Ian to make the gift in his will. But instead Ian gave him a sum of such a size that there would be no inheritance tax to pay. And then David’s mother gave him a little bit more in such a way that, if she outlived the gift by seven years, there would have been no inheritance tax to pay.

Compare that counterfactual to what actually happened and there’s a £70,000 inheritance tax saving.

I think this is, in a meaningful sense, tax avoidance."

Jolyon Maugham, tax expert.

They actually said it was to equalise what Cameron got with what his siblings received. That is money indirectly from his dad. Can't be seen any other way.

Anniebach, do you have ISAs? Or investments?

I say scrap inheritance tax , it's a shit tax anyway.

I havent a clue about this sort of thing, but are Government pensions in off-shore accounts?
And the money that our Government doesnt need use of on say a monthly basis?

And all Goverments' money around the world?
Or cant they use them for that?
Or perhaps that is a daft idea. Or perhaps not.

The Sunday Times had Dodgy Daves father as worth 10million quite some time ago according to something I was reading today.

No obieone, I have already replied to the same question from Nonnie, I trust you too are not going to tell me because if this do I wouldn't understand.

I do wondered why I have been asked the same question in the same evening.

What I have asked us why invest off shore

The government doesnt have any money put by for our pensions, hasn't for donkeys years. We live hand to mouth.

"Sir Alan said Mr Cameron, who has faced questions about an offshore fund set up by his late father, had been unfairly criticised.

The outspoken Sir Alan was both jeered and cheered as he continued, adding: "We risk seeing a House of Commons which is stuffed full of low achievers, who hate enterprise, hate people who look after their own family and who know absolutely nothing about the outside world".

This is what Alan Duncan thinks of ordinary people. Another one who might lose his seat in the next election. Rutland, I think.

The same Alan Duncan who claimed more than £4,000 in expenses for work to his garden. So that's what a high achiever is