But on the industrial scale, you get large firms advising their clients in very lawful ways how to pay less tax. But discussion of an important tax conundrum for the humble self-employed at home – whether to be a sole trader or a company – was a tad brief.

One of the hardest hits in the book stems from our rebel’s experience of a tax fixer in Australia who used transfer pricing for Papua New Guinean timber. per cent tax rate, I would too, but it shows the non-dom law is dodgy – and it’s absurd there’s only one person in the country who could change that law, and she’s married to him. HMRC has suggested it might launch its own appeal, but one tax expert has accused the agency of a “ bungled investigation“. Aggressive tax avoidance, on the other hand, is when someone complies with the letter of the law but aims to “ subvert its purpose”.He fessed up to it, saying it was all at the behest of the Bahraini owners, and that the property would fall within the scope of UK taxes “from now on” (only). I’d always accepted that the tax system in big western democracies was stupidly over-complicated, and that the law allowed people to weave through those laws to arrive at their most beneficial outcome….

There’s no mullet, ripped jeans or leather jacket; our bespectacled “rebel” is wearing a plain fleece over an ordinary shirt. Finally we get an analysis of Universal Credit, lambasting the fact that someone on UC who gets a job loses 55% of his benefit, so is effectively paying a 55% tax rate, while a millionaire accountancy partner is paying a 51% rate. Very funny (and furious)… By the end of the book you may be spluttering with rage at the injustice of it all.Third, the rebel would replace VAT with a “No Value Added Tax”, whereby products and services would be charged different rates depending on how ethical, useful to society and environmentally friendly they are. The shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, says Labour would abolish the “non-dom” tax status if it wins the next general election. If you want to know how skewed the system is and how the rich always get richer and stay that way, while you don’t, then read this book. It was leased by an Isle of Man company to a British Virgin Islands company via a Guernsey-based company – all three companies owned by Hamilton. At page 255 we are reminded that in 2013 came “the legislation that was to end the golden era”, in the shape of the ‘general anti-abuse rule’ (GAAR).