Witchard Murphy
Posted by Christie Malry on November 8, 2010 at 9:28 am
This week's winner of the prize for mealy-mouthed non-apology is our dear friend, Ritchie:
The argument about whether the tax avoided was £6 billion or not is a red herring – as I am sure Vodafone and H M Revenue & Customs both know. The question is why a settlement was reached when HMRC was winning its case. And why the overall tax burden of UK based multinational corporations is falling so fast.
I hope the protestors continue to demand tax justice.
I'm afraid the £6 billion is very much at the heart of the argument. Vodafone says the number is garbage. HMRC say the number is garbage. So why won't Ritchie come out and support Vodafone here? One can hardly blame them for accepting a settlement offered to them by their regulator. In law, their liability in respect of those tax years is now extinguished in full.
If anyone is to blame here, it must be HMRC for settling while the tax campaigners believe they still had a case. So why is Vodafone bearing the brunt of the campaigners' fury, rather than HMRC? Shouldn't they be banging down the doors at 100 Parliament Street instead?
Of course, there's a simple answer to that - campaigners are idiots who believe any old half-baked crap they read on Twitter and act on it. But there's a more complicated answer too. And that's that tax really does matter in the real world. Ritchie has been at the forefront of arguments to make tax avoidance, no matter how mild, as bad as tax evasion. Vodafone is the flashpoint at which that argument meets real people. By prevaricating over their clear innocence, Ritchie is fuelling the flames of the current dispute and causing real harm to workers at and investors in Vodafone.
He has nominated himself as tax's Witchfinder General and he now has blood on his hands. He must now make it perfectly clear that he believes Vodafone has no more to answer in respect of their UK tax filings. The longer he goes without putting a stop to this, it will become harder and harder to wash the blood off.
You are forgetting that Ritchie isn't vilifying Vodafone out of principle, he has an agenda.
Ritchie's paymasters at the TUC don't want the cuts. Vodafone as exercised its rights under UK and EU law to pay the minimum tax possible. The amount between what they did pay and what they could pay just happens to be almost the same as the cut in the government budget in June. The public sector unions want their people to stay employed in the government gravy train and they are willing to make many more people working for Vodafone unemployed to do that.
And these are the kind, considerate people who care about their fellow man, unlike us selfish 'neo-liberal' types...
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Whilst this is all rather pathetic and predictable from the usual crowd that bleat about their rights but ignore the rule of law when it suits their agenda, there are nevertheless some issues which need to be addressed.
Firstly, why the settlement in the light of the Litigation Settlements Strategy ? The LSS, being HMRC policy on taking disputes to court rather than entering into a compromise settlement, suggests very strongly that the Vodafone dispute should have been taken into court for a make or break outcome.
Secondly, who, in reality, signed off on the settlement with Vodafone ? Much as I have little time for Dave Hartnett, he had showed plenty of appetite for taking this dispute (and plenty of others) into court, and there is, as yet, no meaningful explanation for his change of heart. It is hard to believe that Hartnett made the call on Vodafone. My guess is that he was over-ruled, or instructed by, the Treasury to reach a settlement.
Thirdly, if there was a political deal (albeit one that can be based on arguable legal opinion over the merits of the case), there is the potentail for an EC competion law issue; the argument being that the possible tax forgone as a consequence of the settlement was unlawful State Aid.
To the extent these is validity in these concerns, there are legitimate issues which need to be examined.
Thanks for your comment, which - as ever - is completely on the money.
I agree. Yet each of your points need answers at a political level. If there's any corruption, and there may yet prove to be, government has to explain itself. No-one can really blame Vodafone for taking the deal of the decade.
Closing down their shops simply misses the point entirely.