Smile are VERY good on the phone. Online and app are no good thogh

It’s a golden goose for them; they can put prices up, and just blame the size of the payouts.

No. They’re in a highly competitive market. Consumers don’t GAF about their costs. Insurance companies would prefer to keep their money instead of giving it to chancers

So much of the ‘rich person’ tax avoidance (the kind the papers care about) boils down to ‘living somewhere else’, or ‘having your company somewhere else’.

This is a wrong-headed comment. Firstly, there’s practically bugger all “living somewhere else” going on. Living somewhere else is basically a fair deal: if you don’t want to contribute to society through the medium of taxes, then you should go and live in a society that shares your values. However, practically the opposite occurs: we have a boatload of non-doms who live in this society but are not required to make the same financial contributions the rest of us make.

Second, again, there is nothing wrong with people doing business abroad. Go west, young man – sell fridges to Eskimos or sand to Arabs if you’re good at it. The thing that pisses everyone off is people doing business here and then sending the resulting revenue to spurious companies that do nothing substantive in jurisdictions where the business does nothing, purely for the purpose of dodging tax, avoiding disclosure or laundering the funds.

Sounds like the STW live show.

Oof.

Tbf STW posters’ doors are locked from the inside…

I don’t think Cameron will be pushed out: who would want to take over a split Tory party 3 months before a dirty referendum? Far better to wait until after the referendum: even if the Leavers lose, the campaign will damage Cameron.

That’s true, but a justice system could orient itself towards creating an environment for, and giving offenders the tools for, rehabilitation.

Or it could just lock a bunch of illiterate, unhealthy, angry people in small rooms at great expense.

It costs almost £100,000 a year to keep an offender in YOI and still they don’t do a great job of rehabilitating. That’s almost three times more than Eton. Imprisonment is a crap way of rehabilitating and we should stop pretending that’s what prisons are for.

I suspect the aggravating factor would be the associated assault and bloke in a coma.

I understood he was convicted of burglary, not assault.

I’m sorry to hear you were burgled. In addition to the property, it’s a horrible feeling and I understand how pissed off you must feel.

Three years for burglary from a garage is a pretty significant sentence. There must have been a bunch of aggravating factors.

How many years would you like him to have been sentenced to?

There is a dialogue (or do I mean dialectic?) between media producers and consumers. They pander to our tastes but they also shape them.

Why is that interesting?

I’m looking forward to the explanation of why the Guardian avoiding tax on the sale of Autotrader was OK but paying tax on the proceeds of an offshore trust isn’t

Is it because the Guardian doesn’t legislate or enforce tax law?

If said celeb is making money from having squeaky clean image or politician from having trustworthy image then is it not fair that we find out the truth?

2) I think you’d have to show that the politician’s capacity to exercise a public function is actually affected by their private conduct or that they’re acting in a way that’s seriously incompatible with their policies.

1) I think for a celeb it’s even harder to justify intrusion into their private life. I have no idea what Lloyd Grossman’s private life is like but I don’t buy his pasta sauce because I care about his bedroom life. And the celebrity that is supposedly the subject of this story doesn’t have a squeaky clean image and hasn’t espoused one in living memory!

couldn’t agree more, it’s not news but why the injunction. Just brings more attention.

Because if you don’t have a court tell evil global media corporations to stop abusing people’s private lives, they won’t.

You think injunctions are counterproductive? What about all the ones you haven’t heard about?

Oh yes all very clever, but people have a right to their private lives. There is no legitimate public interest in these people’s sex lives, it’s just voyeuristic prurience. Millions of pounds of public money haven’t gone missing because of their bedroom antics (or whatever).

And, err, it’s not a super injunction…

troubles where not religiously motivated so there was no one at mass to speak to. I was focused on it in terms of avoiding public places, being used to having taxi/car stopped at roadside in the “ring of steel”, colleagues impacted by bomb blasts (eg Aldwych).

You said that you would done everything you could to root out and report Christian terrorists. When the rubber hit the road, your efforts consisted of…not hearing anything about it at mass and then shrugging your shoulders.

You claimed you were “very focused” on IRA terrorism but that seems to consist in reality of minor traffic inconvenience, and less of an impact than millions of other (actual) Londoners.

No Tesla need to up their game in supply chain management and dealer networks, otherwise they’ll get crushed by the big players as the Japs did to the US car industry previously.

Fine by me – I don’t really care which car companies survive or die so long as there’s innovation that means my cars get cheaper, cleaner and better

many is more than one no?

:D your bicycle has many wheels; you have many hands; there have been many world wars; and yet Adolf still does not have many balls…

Almost certainly, the big Uni’s have been favouring EU researchers over UK ones for years. The best analogy is it is like the Premier League where the top Uni’s can pick the best researchers and make no effort to try and develop home talent from the lower leagues as happened in years gone by.

But conversely if you’re a good 17 year old cadet player, it doesn’t mean your professional career is over because you didn’t get signed by a premier league team – you can always play in a European team to gain experience and skills.

That’s right. Vladimir Putin’s daughters are very smart and hard working. It’s no surprise they’re independently wealthy. I don’t know why everyone wants to make some sort of connection between them and their father.

Wilburt, are you sure the architect of that scheme you described wasn’t Cameroonian rather than Nigerian?

£170bn in a City where the median salary is £35k, which allows a typical couple buying at 5 times salary to raise £350k to buy somewhere, so £170bn is the equivalent of just under half a million additional couples or nearly 1 million extra people in a city of 8.5m…

Only part of that £170bn is in London. Only part of that part is in residential property. Only part of that part of that part is like having extra people in London because the huge majority will be rented out (which deflates sale prices).

Your assumptions need work.

Car door on tube outrage

7/10 rant. A good effort and some moments of incomprehensibility, but needs more swearing and capitals

Unlikely to be any big us names because of the way their tax system works.

London’s expensive property doesn’t really have a lot to do with high end corruption. Putin is not buying two bed flats in Morden.

I don’t know. Does it involve signing an Internet petition?

No, it involves putting your hand in your pocket and doing more than whining on the internet. I didn’t think you’d be interested.

Are any of you buggers going to join/fund the Tax Justice Network, Oxfam, Transparency International or any of the other groups who have been criticising offshore companies for donkeys?

But stop bleating on like it wont work just becasue it wont work for you.

Easy tiger – that’s a lot of italics and pointed comments to someone that was making a very reasonable point, calmly

that dealership charges and tyre costs can be high.

Idk about dealership costs for electric cars because none of the electric bits of my old Prius ever went wrong (in fact, nothing did). And the tyres were an unusual size but not more expensive or worn than most – certainly got the run flats that everyone complains about.

There was a thread a while back on soft drinks that ended up with people utter disbelieving that people could carry around a reusable water bottle and fill from a public source. They came up with all sorts of reasons which were mostly crap.

Like most internet arguments: hybrid cars are rubbish and full of technology that will immediately fail, plastic bag taxes are stupid because people will never bring their own and will just end up buying ten times more rubbish bags, only nerds will read the Internet on their phones, 29″ wheels are just a gimmick, Donald Trump has no chance of getting the nomination…

You don’t have to live in the UK to vote in the referendum (which is a minor outrage): https://www.gov.uk/government/world-location-news/did-you-know-expats-will-be-able-to-vote-in-the-eu-referendum

@ghostly I understand your comment that many people do less than 10,000 a year but many do nit and many may not use the car much one week but do 500 miles the next. I do only 3,000-5,000 pa in my car but it sits unsed for weeks then we might do 500-1000 in one period

That just means this model is not for you. It’s not for everyone. No one has said it is.

I wouldn’t expect many electric cars at Canary Wharf Waitrose – if only because practically no one commutes by car there, and those who do aren’t going to saunter out twice in the middle of their working day to charge their car in a supermarket car park. Those who live locally to CW aren’t going to be buying expensive electric cars either

I think many people will be happy to plug in at home – after all, loads of people seem happy to drive all over the place to save thppence hapenny on a litre of diesel

Who exactly do you think you are disagreeing with and over what?

And instead of making rhetorical questions, why don’t you just make statements about what you think is the case?

BCCI has been extensively banged on about for two decades. It’s hardly a little known topic

If you have a lot of money/assets its legal to put them into an offshore trust.

It’s not legal if you’re a Russian public servant and you have not disclosed their existence. Which is the whole story in relation to Putin. :roll:

Spanish ATMs in Lancashire compromised by Chinese hackers using Russian software, binners to blame London-centric Islington liberals.

That’s not the specific aspect of the Starbucks model that binners is referring to…although on a net basis I don’t think Starbucks put any coffee shops out of business…in fact quite the opposite

That article doesn’t actually say anything tangible will be lost by leaving

Scientific knowledge is rarely tangible…

Opposing privatisation and free trade is not the monopoly of the left (as the article demonstrates).

proceeds of crime act (or whatever it’s called) could go for the money

Would be very hard to make that stick. Wayne Rooney could contract kill a bus full of nuns and still be fabulously rich and the end of it.

Call me “PC gone mad” but that sounds a bit risky. I managed to dump myself in the canal 2 or 3 times even as a 12 year old…

What would happen if the government bought out PT (and possibly the rest of the steel making industry) as a supplier for capital projects such as road/rail/defence etc? They could supply steel for government contracts with the necessary adjustments in the contract price to reflect the fact that they’d be getting the steel free.

Governments are rubbish at business; they’re not even that great at government.

How much steel do you think the government buys in a year?