DON’T TAKE THAT!
FORMER TAKE THAT! frontman Gary Barlow opened his heart to reporters yesterday, telling them how the pressures of fame at the height of his pop success had made him pile on the pounds into an offshire account.
Barlow, known as the one who could play the piano a bit, revealed that things first started to go badly in the late nineties. He said: “One day we were a struggling band, the next we were on a world tour with a four album deal.”
“If I’m honest, I didn’t handle it very well, and I started to invest in an index-linked, enterprise, investment venture capital scheme.”
CHEQUES
“Even after I quit music in 1999, the royalty cheques just kept coming in. I was just sat in my big house in Cheshire, and my bank balance just got bigger and bigger. I simply didn’t know what to do with all the money,” he said.
“I was so embarrassed by it all, but the thought of paying tax and contributing to the welfare of others just seemed silly. So I just continued piling the pounds into an offshore haven.”
Barlow continued living the high life and packing on the cash throughout the noughties. But one day, after getting out of the shower, he caught a glimpse of his bank statement on the bedside table.
“I couldn’t believe how bloated my account had become,” he said.
BOMBS
It was the sight of his distended balance – along with a BBC Panorama report into high profile tax avoidance schemes – that finally led the stout-walleted singer to act.
I decided I had to shed a few million pounds, so I did,” he said.
“A lot of people think that the song Back for Good was about some bird who’d kicked me into touch, but in reality it was about all the cash I’d been forced to hand over to the Inland Revenue to keep my OBE,” he added.
Pressures of fame made me put my money in offshore tax havens ~ Barlow