Repatriate the tax exiles

JIM Ratcliffe has earned the right to be listened to on fracking and Britain’s energy future. his enterprise Ineos plays a big role in the UK’s oil refining and chemical industries and is making big investments in hydrogen (unfortunately not all in the UK) in spite of lukewarm government support for the technology.

As Ratcliffe powerfully notes, it is ‘ridiculous’ that with so much gas under our feet, its offer to build a shale test site is not being embraced.

There is admiration for Ratcliffe and all his works, even though he decided to build the Grenadier 4x4 – successor to the Rover Defender – in France rather than in Wales.

When he makes any investment pronouncements about the UK, one can only feel regret that like a number of British selfmade entrepreneurs and sports personalities, he would rather base himself in Monaco than in his native land.

Ratcliffe’s firms employ more than 10,000 staff in the UK through the PAYe system, which provides few opportunities to avoid taxes. It would be terrific if he and others, who make a contribution to our national prosperity, did the same. It is incomprehensible that those with the most resources take advantage of such devices as nondomicile status and tax havens.

Not so long ago it was the case that executives at the top and star traders in Britain’s financial sector found all kinds of extraordinary ways of being paid bonuses outside the tax system. Over time, successive chancellors and hMRC have worked their socks off to block loopholes.

As a consequence, the top 0.1pc of Britain’s taxpayers, just 50,000 people, actually contribute 10pc of the nation’s burgeoning income tax bill. As the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Paul Johnson, observes in The Times, that is 100 times that of the average taxpayer.

Moreover, 1pc of the population actually pays one third of income taxes. There is something in the tea which makes British people distrustful of the financial sector and ‘fat cats’ in Britain’s boardrooms.

Shareholder activists spend vast amounts of time focusing on directors’ greed, bonuses and payments for failure.

What they neglect to acknowledge is that income taxes gobble up a significant chunk of this money. Because most of these top financial jobs are in the UK, the bosses, like the workforce, are greatly supporting public services.

Johnson points out that some of these high earners, particularly those in professional services, are able to game the system.

They are technically self-employed so they don’t experience the full brunt of national insurance and income tax levies.

It would be better if they did, especially as lawyers and accountants are the very people the nation relies upon to police the integrity of the Square Mile. The speed with which Akshata Murty, wife of the Chancellor Rishi Sunak, reversed her non-domicile status has to be applauded.

It is time for all the tax avoiders to eschew that better yacht or villa and come home.

Russian roulette

ShAReS of French bankers Societe Generale received a boost with the disclosure that it had offloaded its stake in Russia’s Rosbank and its insurance subsidiaries to Interros Capital.

It is good to see eU sanctions biting and financial groups cutting their ties to Vladimir Putin’s rogue state.

The difficulty is that the buyer of the assets is ultimately controlled by Vladimir Potanin, one of Russia’s richest people. his fortune is based on Norilsk Nickel, one of the world’s largest producers of palladium.

So far Potanin has escaped the long arm of eU sanctions although the Russian mogul has fallen foul of Canadian sanctions.

SocGen has done its own investors a favour. But in passing the buck, it inadvertently could be supporting Moscow.

Power play

WheN energy giant eon decided to pull out

of the horizon nuclear project in the UK a decade ago, it did so after then German chancellor Angela Merkel suspended new atomic projects in Germany.

With Berlin under pressure to immediately cut back on its dependence on Russian coal and gas, eon is doing the same again.

It has decided not to extend the life of its last nuclear power plant, arguing ‘there is no future for nuclear in Germany, period’.

Will voters agree when the lights go out and there is not enough electricity to power the next generation of VWs?