I was out at a dinner last night where someone suggested to me that the two things the UK feels most passionate about are the NHS and Football?
So with this week's news being full of the action taken by Junior Doctors, this article screamed to me from my inbox just now and I found myself thinking about the gap between the equivalent proposed pay for junior doctors and the somewhat more significant salaries of young footballers.
How can it be that in a few years one might be able to amass the fortune very few of us (including our doctors) might earn in a lifetime?
Therefore, whilst a personal tragedy, I have no doubt for those who sought the advice of others to help them with their tax affairs, I think the time has come for us all to check in on our own moral compass. Only, as the reality of all the austerity measures begin to bite there will be many more people in our communities in desperate need of our help and what we need to accept is the unintended consequences of all our collective actions. So the only chance we have for a better, fairer society is for everyone to pay their taxes equally and fairly.
Photograph by kind permission of Visionhaus.co.uk
Professional footballers who invested in film partnership tax avoidance schemes, are facing 'calamitous' financial consequences. According to Daniel Northall, a specialist employment lawyer at Littleton Chambers, successful footballers can earn large amounts but only for a limited number of years and in looking to plan for the future, invested in these schemes which 'may have been sold to investors as an entirely legitimate and safe means of shielding earnings against income tax'. Some now face financial ruin through their involvement in such schemes such as Eclipse 35, now defeated by HMRC in the England & Wales Court of Appeal. Few investors could have predicted this outcome and the consequences are devastating: not only have to pay income tax they thought they had avoided, but also tax on income received by the partnership under the film licensing agreement....
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