Punk’s Dame Viv pulls plug on ‘hypocritical’ tax scheme
HAS DAME Vivienne Westwood decided the label of ‘ tax avoider’ is not a good look?
I can reveal the free- spirited fashion designer, 76, has ended a controversial financial arrangement that saw her branded a ‘hypocrite’ for allegedly not paying her share of taxes. Dame Vivienne’s main UK business previously paid up to £2 million a year to an offshore company based in Luxembourg, for the right to use her name on her own label.
The arrangement was similar to one used by coffee chain Starbucks, and critics calculated it could have cheated the Treasury out of around £500,000 a year. ‘This has to be tax avoidance,’ fumed a tax expert when the scandal emerged in 2015. ‘Why else would you make these payments to a company in Luxembourg?’
Now the designer credited with creating punk has decided to cut her cloth in more conventional fashion.
According to documents published this week, Dame Vivienne’s international fashion empire transferred the rights to her trademarks back from her Luxembourg-based parent company to the UK business at the start of the year.
The 2016 accounts for her UK business say: ‘The economic ownership of Vivienne Westwood’s trademarks will be transferred from 1 January 2017 from the parent company Latimo SA to Vivienne Westwood Limited.’
Perhaps the move will rebuild bridges with the Green Party.
Dame Vivienne donated £300,000 to the party in the run-up to the 2015 election. But she was accused of tax avoidance just two months later, hard on the heels of the Greens’ pledge to ‘crack down heavily on tax havens and tax avoidance’. ‘It makes the Green Party hypocrites for taking her money and Westwood a hypocrite for backing a party with policies she does not appear to endorse,’ said a critic.
A spokesman for Dame Vivienne declined to comment on the decision to close her controversial ‘licence fees’ arrangement in Luxembourg, which was put in place in 2002.
The UK company paid £1.8 million to Latimo for licence fees in 2016, following £1.4million in 2015, £1.6million in 2014 and £2.0million in 2013.
The designer has previously denied tax avoidance at her firm, saying it pays ‘all the required taxes’.