Labour class warrior’s PR husband and ‘tax avoiders’
Ed Miliband announced plans to s oak t he ‘wealthy’ in his keynote Labour conference speech yesterday, but one of his frontbenchers is enjoying a boost to her own household income — from a company advising a City firm accused of helping the superrich to avoid paying tax.
Shadow Minister for Women Gloria de Piero’s husband, James Robinson, is working for the firm that handles public relations for Ingenious, whose suspected tax avoidance schemes were used by celebrities from david Beckham to Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Former Guardian journalist Robinson, who married glamorous ex-GMTV presenter de Piero in 2012, is a senior consultant for Powerscourt, which won the lucrative contract to be ‘principal financial and corporate PR adviser’ to Ingenious that year.
de Piero, previously Shadow Minister for Crime Prevention, insists she was not aware of her husband’s controversial new bedfellow. ‘We have a rule in our house that we don’t discuss James’s clients,’ she tells me.
His boss, Rory Godson, refuses to confirm that Robinson works on the I ngenious account. ‘ We never comment on our clients,’ he says.
In his speech, Miliband announced plans to crack down on those who dodged taxes. ‘We will raise £1billion from tax avoidance i ncluding by closing the loopholes for the hedge funds,’ he declared.
Ingenious has written to its celebrity investors warning them of ‘draconian’ plans by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs to make them pay up to £1billion they had received in tax relief.
A string of household names face having to pay the taxman the huge total in a dispute over a suspected tax avoidance scheme. They each paid a minimum £100,000 to invest in a film venture that promised to combine box office hits with tempting tax breaks. Gary Lineker, Bob Geldof, Anne Robinson and Victoria Beckham are also among those affected.
The Ingenious film scheme is to be tested at a tax tribunal scheduled for November, but HMRC is asking investors to repay money even before their case comes to court. Ingenious called the HMRC’s demands ‘indiscriminate and unfair’.
A spokesman for the firm said: ‘Ingenious has been trying to obtain a definitive ruling on the tax status of its film and games partnerships for many years.’