THE DJ TAX DODGE

BOUTIQUE advisers are consultants who design the riskiest of tax-avoidance schemes.

Their clients are very rich, often household names. The advisers we looked at worked with comedian Jimmy Carr; radio DJ Chris Moyles; footballers David Beckham and Steven Gerrard; singers Robbie Williams and Annie Lennox; and TV presenters Jeremy Paxman and Anne Robinson.

One scheme was Working Wheels, marketed by Tax Trade. The idea was that clients claim on their tax returns that they were self-employed used car dealers. They registered huge losses from fictitious trading they could offset against tax.

Chris Moyles claimed to have sold second-hand cars worth £3,731, but to have incurred losses totalling £1 million.

Those losses were set against the tax he should have paid on the £700,000 he earned from the BBC (funded by the taxpayer through the licence fee).

When we asked the managing director of Tax Trade, Aiden James, to describe how the scheme worked, he said he couldn’t because he was bound by confidentiality agreements.

Fortunately, I’d been leaked details of the company’s sales pitch. So James had to admit the fictional cars were just a device to avoid tax.

HMRC took three users of this scheme — including Moyle — to the tax tribunal.

Between them, they’d avoided paying £8 million in tax.