THE UK Government is blackmailing people with offshore bank accounts, according to a lawyer in Guernsey.
Paul Arditti, who has just joined Collas Day as a consultant, said using stolen evidence to prosecute tax dodgers was a crime in itself.
It emerged in Febuary that HM Revenue and Customs had paid an informant £100,000 for data of scores of wealthy Britons with offshore accounts.
‘I have no more sympathy for a tax dodger than anyone else, but I have even less sympathy for a government that’s supposed to be responsible for law and order but who breaks it,’ said Mr Arditti. ‘How can the UK Government prosecute someone when it itself has broken the law?’
The stolen data belonged 100 British citizens who have accounts at Liechtenstein’s biggest bank.
The informant who sold the information last year provoked a storm in Germany by selling data of 750 wealthy Germans to the country’s intelligence service for £3.2m.
Anyone found by HMRC to have evaded tax will be forced to pay back 100% of the money owed or face a jail sentence of up to seven years.
‘What the government is doing is blackmail because it is the threat of an illegal act in return for compliance,’ said Mr Arditti.
‘I just wonder what the UK and German governments are using as brains.
‘As a lawyer with 35 years’ experience, it enrages me to see people who are responsible for the most important aspect of our society – law and order – breaking it.’
Later this month Mr Arditti is attending a conference in London about the immediate risks posed by HMRC’s new powers and penalties.
He said it would be interesting because the UK and one or two other EU governments were in serious financial trouble as a result of the credit crunch.
Mr Arditti is a former partner of law firm Ince and Co. and has worked as a litigator all over the world.
He lives in Alderney and flies a helicopter, which he says is a useful way of travelling in the Channel Islands.
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2 Article Comments
This is what this government is about though…
Always bending the rules to suit, especially when it comes to tax and squeezing a little extra out of anyone they can.
It continually astounds me that the GP can print such one sided alarmist views and a real shame that it needs to take a somewhat stupid and poorly conceived publicity statement from a consultant looking for “a foot in the door” and sensationalise it in order to fill up page space.
The facts are that for those UK residents who are offshore account holders (not the far wider population of offshore account holders as implied in the article), if they have appropriately declared all of their income and paid all of their taxes as required by law this action by HMRC will not lead to any further tax liabilities for those people. It is not “squeezing a little extra out” as Jeremy might think.
As to thinking it is underhand, I suspect most people would be applauding their resourcefulness if they had done the same (as in fact many police forces throughout the world do) in order to track down a paedophile or drugs racket etc.