Is it OK to break the law if you are a Tory?

Katie59

Zahawi is a crook he knew exactly what he was doing, he had his comeuppance with a 30% surcharge now he needs to loose his job, we don’t need MPs that deliberately evade taxes.

Yes, simple as ...

The latest in a long and lingering stench of CONservative sleaze, coercion and corruption emanating from CONservative central office, Downing Street, Whitehall and Westminster sees the former chancellor, Nadhim Zahawi, fighting for his political career.

The CONservative party chairman and Chancellor of the Dutchy of Lancaster seat within Rishi Sunak’s Government of ‘Integrity, Professionalism and Accountability’ appears to be on less than Stable ground as his tax affairs are picked over by the press and media.

It has been reported that solicitors letters were sent by lawyers, acting for Mr Zahawi, threatening legal action against an individual investigating the Tory MP's financial affairs ... and later that attempts were made to block publication of this investigation in the press ...

... this follows an interview given by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer last year who, it would appear, told barefaced lies to Kay Burley and her viewers about who benefit from the Gibraltar offshore trust 'Balshore Investments Limited'.
The Tory cabinet minister was benefitting from this offshore trust, as a financial document published by YouGov showed that a dividend payment due to go to Balshore ... instead was used to pay off loans owed by Mr Zahawi.

The above actions are not those of a politician that lives by Nolan’s seven principles of public life; that strives to adhere to parliamentary codes of conduct and practices or even comply with our nations rule of law ... but of a conniving conman determined to protect his fortune from the taxman from a position of power.

The Tory chairman’s carefully worded written response that his actions were "careless and not a deliberate error" cannot be accepted in light of the weight of evidence against him and his subsequent actions to the contrary.

Dan Neidle

More questions. If Zahawi just made an innocent mistake and did his civic duty in cleaning it up… why did he threaten to sue people reporting on it? And try to keep those threats secret?

Tax evasion is illegal and should be prosecuted. Tax avoidance, while legal, is all too common especially by the wealthy with teams of accountants and lawyers. Parliament should legislate to minimize it. No ifs, no buts.

Grantanow I agree but why do you think Parliament of all hues hasn’t changed the laws as much as possible to avoid tax evasion? Could be a mutual benefit?

There's absolutely no way in which a man of Zahawi's intelligence and business acumen could make an innocent mistake. There is an enormous range of innocent mistakes but setting up an offshore fund to transfer my shareholdings to is not one of them. With the kind of money involved anyone would be thinking seriously about that action and maybe consulting more than one set of advisers.

Exactly!

It has now been announced that Sunak has asked his ethics adviser to investigate the Zahawi affair.

So there's another can being kicked down the road.

In meantime, Zahawi is refusing to resign as tory party Chairman and says he will not comment on his tax affairs until the enquiry reports.

Happygirl79

Fleurpepper

Probably because so many of them are guilty of same! Disgusting.

We should all write to our MPs about this, and say exactly what is in the OP.

I totally agree. The others are probably doing exactly the same

There would be litttle point in me writing to my MP, David Warburton

"Tory MP broke rules over £150,000 loan from Russian businessman watchdog finds.

David Warburton apologises after standards chief finds he failed to properly register and declare loan"

www.independent.co.uk/independentpremium/uk-news/conservative-mp-russia-david-warburton-b2230785.html

Warburton was "rapped over the knuckles " and told not to do it again by the standards chief, in spite of his having brought the dodgy Russian into the House of Commons to introduce him to Rees Mogg in an attempt to have his ban from involvement in financial services lifted and havingprocured a lucrative part time job for his brother-in-law with the dodgy Russian.

Nothing seems to have yet been resolved about the accusations of sexual assault by three different women or the evidence of Warburton consuming what appeared to be cocaine which appeared all over newspapers last April.

Obviously there should have been a byelection in Somerton and Frome, which was previously represented by a good Liberal Democrat for eighteen years, but the Tory Party seems so used to its MPs misbehaving that he has not been forced to resign. Warburton was listed as a member of the ERG.

The so-called Conservative Party, now controlled by the ERG, is rotten to the core.

Does anyone mind if I broaden the topic? A very quick look at

thebackbencher.co.uk

A brief history of Labour tax avoidance by Lee Jenkins April 11th 2016

And of course I am sure there’s even more written about the Conservatives etc. The point I am trying to make is that political power has been and continues to be used to the advantage of the political class in agreeing to the current system of tax avoidance and evasion.

Please don’t shoot the messenger.

We are now in 2023- so that is all irrelevant. Now is NOW- and this is the current situation that needs investigating.

Fleurpepper

We are now in 2023- so that is all irrelevant. Now is NOW- and this is the current situation that needs investigating.

I shall try again. Nesrine Malik Guardian TODAY

Look at how the 1 per cent are doing right now, and tell me the system isn’t rigged.

Available online. Then scream 😱

Well, try starting a thread about this, ronib and watch how many posters come to the defence of the accumulation of wealth. It's like Stockholm syndrome. identified in situations where people held to ransom by extremist groups come to sympathise and identify with their captors. People seeing the acquisition of wealth as a desirable objective because they hope that they will be able to do it themselves. Even though most of them have no chance...

Heaven knows, I've tried it in the past.

Root of the problem as I see it is that the acquisition of money, which is merely a token which facilitates the exchange of goods and services, is seen as a desirable objective in itself, not because it can enable the purchase of goods and services, but just for the sake of having enormous amounts of it. Most of which does nothing at all but sit in accounts of one sort or another doing absolutely nothing, except perhaps attract more money to itself in the form of interest and dividends. It's just dead stuff.

The other problem, for me, is that people don't seem to take on board the fact that the money that is being accumulated was originally their money. Money that they pay for goods and services which generates huge profits for the wealth accumulators. Profits to be hoarded because that is the objective of wealth accumulation; just the acquisition of more and more unused, dead, money.

The system is rigged because admiration of the wealthy has put them into positions where they can control how they acquire their money. Adam Smith warned against this in the 18th century

...Smith is adamant that law and policy should never be entrusted to those who live by profit.

"The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the publick, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the publick, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.”

dboucoyannis.weebly.com/uploads/1/3/9/3/13938365/smith_paper_oct_2013.pdf

(this is well worth reading because Smith is held to be one of the founding fathers of the justifications for capitalist economies)

Smith's warning was, of course, ignored because those who controlled the law were the wealthy and influential members of society who made the law to benefit themselves. This was so in Britain until the early 20th century. So admiration for, and aspiration to, wealth for its own sake is engrained in the national consciousness. The wealthy and the aspirants to wealth have fought hard against any attempt to limit their wealth and any attempt to distribute it more equably. Aided by voters who inexplicably think that wealthy people people will know how to 'run the country', when in fact all that most of the wealthy know is how to run their finances so as to accumulate more wealth. What is more, these voters believe that they are dependent on the wealthy for their own financial survival and tend to support their justifications for not paying their workforce more.

IMO it is obscene how many unused, dead, trillions of various currencies lie unused in a world so full of poverty.

MaizieD I can stop banging my head against a brick wall. I am so grateful for your views. I shall come back to you.

ronib

MaizieD I can stop banging my head against a brick wall. I am so grateful for your views. I shall come back to you.

👍

I don't think I'm the only one with odd ideas about money on Gnet, though.

Yup there are some very odd ideas on all sorts of topics .. have just printed out the paper.

Something else that smells

The man who gave a £1m donation to Boris Johnson is the largest single shareholder in a UK defence company that secured an £80m government contract.

Some have speculated the donation was intended to fund a potential return to leadership.

Whitewavemark2 Christopher Harborne is presumably the donor. There’s a fair bit about him on the internet.
Also gave £13.7 m to Reform Party apparently and £6m to Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. One could say Boris was short changed with only £1mil.

Interesting that Ben Wallace was overseas director at QinetiQ which has a global revenue of £1.3 billion.

Whitewavemark2 or another way of looking at it is that Rishi Sunak might be a safer pair of hands as he is independently wealthy. Maybe even richer than Harborne?

You can’t despise all wealth because it provides us with pensions, life insurance and taxation to run the government, yes investors actually do pay tax, lots of it. The successful ones amongst us do have more choices but we all end up in the same care home.

Without the opportunity to have a better life there is no point in any kind of enterprise or education just sponge off someone else.

ronib

Whitewavemark2 or another way of looking at it is that Rishi Sunak might be a safer pair of hands as he is independently wealthy. Maybe even richer than Harborne?

Just because Sunak is independently wealthy (well, his wife is wealthier than him) doesn't make him any safer than any other wealth acquirers in his party. He is imbued with the concept for wealth for the sake of it and moves in the same circles as those with the same aspiration. Where has he shown any indication that he has any understanding of how a national economy works, or any empathy with those who have less than him, or any desire to improve their lives?

The only people who could even begin to think he is a safe pair of hands are those who know that he has the same view of how to acquire wealth as he does and that he will do all he can to protect what they now have and help them to acquire more.

God knows why he went into politics...

Sorry, correction ..the same view of how to acquire wealth as they do...

MaizieD I was trying to cheer myself up. What is going on at the global level? Why does someone now living in Thailand see the need to donate money to various political parties in the Uk to the Brexit cause.

I was trying to persuade myself that despite the highest level of State interference in our lives, we appear to have poor outcomes and Sunak is at least economically solvent, unlike his predecessor. I had hoped he might be less dependent on vested interest groups.

My husband was muttering globalisation, the equivalent of a takeover like the British Empire but without the land grab! Good question though why is Rishi Sunak bothering?

You can’t despise all wealth because it provides us with pensions, life insurance

Hang on there, Katie59, apart from state pensions, that's our money, part of what we have earned that goes into pensions and insurance. The 'wealthy' have no part in it.

and taxation to run the government, As taxation doesn't fund spending this is irrelevant.

Without the opportunity to have a better life there is no point in any kind of enterprise or education just sponge off someone else.

God, you are funny, Katie59. Removing some of some people's wealth, or giving them less opportunity to accumulate and hoard it, wouldn't make any difference to the need that most people have to earn a living. The wealthy aren't exactly handing out their excess to the less well endowed, are they? They're not handing it to anyone; they're just sitting on it. Trillions, just doing nothing...

MaizieD the name of the game these days … start ups! You think of a product, you don’t make it, you talk it up and get investors interested. Get investors on board, still no product, get more investment… no product, no worries, go to next project. Or so it was explained to me so not everyone sitting on trillions apparently!