Longleat lovebirds face £2.6m tax battle

LONGLEAT chatelains Viscount and Lady Weymouth are skilled at generating self-publicity with their soap opera-worthy lives, but they can’t escape the taxman.

I can reveal that HMRC has conducted two inquiries into Longleat’s tax affairs in recent years, landing the colourful Wiltshire estate and safari park with a potential £2.6 million tax bill.

According to new financial documents for Longleat Enterprises Limited, the company that runs Longleat’s tourist attractions, the estate was the subject of an inquiry in 2015 relating to its tax affairs, which carried a ‘maximum liability’ of £1.6million.

This follows an earlier inquiry relating to the ‘deductions for corporation tax’ that Longleat paid in 2006.

In a blow for Viscount Weymouth, chairman of Longleat Enterprises Limited, Longleat had to pay the revenue more than £1 million in 2015 to settle that dispute.

Viscount Weymouth and his wife Emma (nee McQuiston, right) hit the headlines during the broadcast of the BBC1 documentary All Change At Longleat. It chronicled the gradual handover of the 10,000-acre Wiltshire estate and safari park from the Marquess of Bath to his son Ceawlin, Viscount Weymouth. Lord Bath, known for his string of 75 ‘wifelets’, boycotted Ceawlin’s 2013 wedding to half-Nigerian model Emma because he and Emma removed some of the gaudy murals Lord Bath had painted on the walls of the Elizabethan mansion. Lord Bath’s wife, Anna, also missed the wedding, after allegedly asking her son whether he was sure about ‘ruining 400 years of bloodline’. A spokesman for Longleat declines to elaborate on the estate’s £2.6million tax battle, or whether the most recent inquiry has been resolved. ‘We have nothing to add,’ he says. In 2015, Longleat’s attractions, including Longleat Safari Park and Cheddar Gorge, raked in record revenues of £30million — although the estate has debts and other loans of £7.9 million. In the latest feud last summer, Ceawlin fell out with one of the family’s trustees so spectacularly that the disagreement ended up in the High Court. Taxing times, indeed.