Harry Potter and the author who paid £20m more tax than Facebook

HARRY Potter author JK Rowling, who has described tax exiles as ‘contemptible’, paid more in tax than Facebook last year, it was revealed yesterday.

Miss Rowling, who has said she wants her family to grow up in Britain rather than in the ‘limbo’ of a tax haven, gave £48.6million to the Treasury in the year to last March.

Facebook is believed to have paid the Treasury just £28million in corporation tax in the 2018/19 tax year.

The bill puts Miss Rowling among the biggest taxpayers in the country – and she is one of seven women in the top 20 of the Sunday Times Tax List. The sums paid by the country’s wealthiest people often outstrip the contributions of internet giants.

Betting tycoon Denise Coates heads the list with a £276million tax bill – more than the £220million paid to the Treasury by Amazon last year. Miss Coates, who turned a chain of Midlands betting shops into the global Bet365 network, has kept her company and fortune in Britain. But her firm is deeply involved in the row over the damage caused by online gambling, which the Daily Mail has campaigned against.

The other women in the top 20 of the Sunday Times list are Leonie Schroder, of the City fund management company Schroders; Carrie Perrodo, whose family own oil and gas firm Perenco; Lady Philomena Clark, of Glasgow-based Arnold Clark Automobiles; Baroness Howard de Walden, whose family own 92 acres of land in west London; and food tycoon Baljinder Boparan.

Miss Rowling, who wrote the first Harry Potter book while on benefits, once said: ‘It would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque.’