Beatles' accountant battled `Taxman'

A fixture in their lives who saved band millions

Harry Pinsker, who has died aged 90, was the Beatles' accountant from 1962 to 1970, overseeing their tax affairs, setting up their companies, helping them to buy their homes and even handling their grocery bills.

“Harry was the only one who really knew what went on,” said Paul McCartney.

Pinsker was a partner in the West End of London offices of Bryce, Hanmer, a Liverpool-based firm of accountants, when he was asked to take on the affairs of four young unknowns who had been marched into the firm's Liverpool offices by their manager, Brian Epstein.

Unimpressed by the pasty-faced youths, the senior partner in Liverpool decided to pass them on to London.

“I first met them in my office — they were just four scruffy boys,” Pinsker recalled in an interview in 2017.

It was he who registered their first company as Beatles Ltd and he became such a fixture in their lives that band members, with or without partners, would drop into his home for tea and a chat, though Pinsker's wife Ana drew the line at admitting McCartney's giant sheepdog, Martha.

It was Pinsker who told the band in 1964 that they were millionaires, and he who noticed an ad for a farm on the Mull of Kintyre that became a home for McCartney and his wife Linda.

The 1966 Beatles song Taxman was a protest against the 95 per cent “supertax” (“Let me tell you how it will be/ There's one for you, 19 for me/ `Cause I'm the taxman...”).

He exploited a range of legal ideas to keep the taxman at bay, including creating the songwriting company Lenmac — which he persuaded the Inspector of Taxes to treat as a trading company, rather than an investment company whose revenue would be subject to higher tax.

In 1966 he was behind the idea of turning the band into employees of The Beatles Co, in which they each owned a five per cent stake, with the remaining shares held by the company and thus subject to corporation tax at around 50 per cent, a move reckoned to have saved them almost three million pounds.

It was Pinsker, too, who in 1967 suggested the creation of Apple, a holding company of which he became a director.

Harry Pinsker