Let's hope he does get a job on Sports Personality Of The Year. Very good article

http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/formula-1 ... e-11488704

What a garbage one sided article.

I am no Hamilton fan, but to completely ignore the work he does for charities/sick children etc, whilst attacking him for not paying tax, whilst he is under no obligation to do so I might add, is completely hypocritical.

Who cares if the guy is finding shortcuts around paying millions in tax, I imagine 99.99% of people would do exactly the same.

The Sports "personality" crap is a complete joke anyway.

welcome to the board!!!

Please read the other tax avoidance thread to find not everyone shares your views and would avoid paying tax.

Every year this country loses £130 billion to the economy from tax avoidance, imagine would that could fund.

You can't lose tax. You either pay it or you don't, within whatever laws are applicable. If the government have loopholes, it's up to them to sort out.

And thanks.

I guess im just in that 0.1% minority that you mention who wouldnt avoid paying tax.

Have you every bought anything in an airport or when on holiday? (cigs, booze, aftershave etc). If so, did you feel the need to pay the duty to the government on your return, even though you don't have to?

Not having a pop, just out of interest.

As he's not resident in the UK he must be up for the overseas personality of the year I suppose.

Its amazing innit

We laud tax dodgers, but demonise benefit cheats, despite the cost of that particular fraud being a drop in the ocean of the UK's revenue

That's not the same at all. For a start who's lauding tax dodgers? If it's withing the laws, what's the issue?

Benefit cheats are stealing. One is within the law, one isn't.

Vodafone are stealing, Costa Coffee are, the Queen is, there are no margins

If they stealing they would be facing criminal proceedings.

I hope the government clamp down on some of these loopholes, but whilst they're there, I really can't see why people attack individuals for exploiting them.

The above post is brought to you in association with the conservative party brainwashing err i mean values.

That's a typical North Easter view. Agree that somebody rich isn't doing anything wrong = Torie wanker. I'm not by the way, I'm just a wanker.

Anyway.....can't talk bollocks on here all day. I've got to get down the dole office to collect my benefits then off to Monaco to purchase my new tax free yacht

He is right though, as they aren’t breaking the law it’s what I was saying the other day If the system can be exploited it’s the system that needs looking at. You can’t compare them to benefits cheats, that is illegal.

I agree with Reads article completely though. SPOTY is popularity contest voted for by the public these days, it would be fairly depressing if Hamilton won and great if Defoe did.

I'm not condoning benefit cheats, just pointing out the cost to the country is a pittance compared to these loopholes

Give it a few weeks, this stuff will be off the front pages of the Daily Mail and replaced with headlines about Dianne Abbott

Why do you say he is under no obligation to pay tax, he was born in an N.H.S hospital and educated in a state school his parents will have claimed at the minimum child benefit all long before he became rich and famous, surely part of the deal is when you are in need you are supported by the state and in return when you are able you pay back into the system through taxation you do so unfortunately people like Lewis Hamilton choose to run of to Monaco or some other tax haven so they can hold onto all their money even though even if they paid all the taxes due they would still be left with more money than they could ever spend.

Money aside, he shouldn't win it because there's welding rods with more personality than him.

My father paid taxes all his life, worked in the shipyard from the age of 14 for almost 50 years, then just before he was to retire, he died from cancer.
So the state saved thousands and thousands by not giving him a pension.
Now my mother needs to go into a care home, because she has her own home, worth less than £100,000, she needs to sell the home to pay for her care.
Where is the fairness in that?
These big companies who find loopholes to save tax, do they not stop to think what the money could be used for?
Looking after our own working class people who need care when they get older for a start!

How can we be sure Jermaine Defoe isn't really Lewis Hamilton?

And there's the issue. The powerful manage to avoid criminalisation, despite causing much more harm than your average joe. And, by the way, benefit fraud isn't theft. It's a Fraud Act offence.

Love the way the apologists equate a bit of duty free or an ISA with multi-millionaire tax avoidance.

I mean, it's all the same, innit? Jack and Joan Ordinary have PAYE and NI deducted from their earnings all their working lives, but the greedy bastards don't say no to a couple of quid off a bottle of booze or perfume, do they?

And if they've got a bit of spare cash O.5% interest at the bank isn't good enough for them, oh no, they want something that pays 1.5% TAX FREE!!

We're all swimming in the same moral cesspit, nobody's got a right to criticise anyone for looking after number one.

It's like Mrs. Thatcher said, there is no such thing as society. Not when you can afford to remove yourself from it, at any rate.

I can't recall suggesting an ISA was the same as anything.

The duty free comment was in response to to Yubep who said he would always pay tax. If you're getting duty free goods, then surely you would feel responsible to pay the duty back to the government? If not......then you're purchasing goods and saving money, the same way LH is doing on a much larger scale.

Is what Hamilton does morally correct? Possibly not. Is it a crime? No. He paid tax for a number of years and will have paid much more into the system than your average Joe would.

If you can save money and theres a way in the system, I really can't see the issue. Tories/Labour are at fault here, they should be working to cut these out.

ISAs were referenced in a previous thread on this subject. That's why I said 'apologists.'

Don't disagree about the need to close tax loopholes but have zero sympathy for the likes of Hamilton, Bono and Carr (a few years back) who are exposed for using them.

Believe it or not, there are rich people - including sportsmen, musicians and comedians - who don't show the same interest in tax evasion.

Maybe there is such a thing as society after all.

It's not so simple; do you have any idea how complex tax law is? For a start, the officials who enforce the law work on their 'interpretation' for complex tax affairs. If they're challenged, they often concede, so as not to generate a difficult legal precedent that means they actually collect less tax overall. The uncertainty means that many of these schemes probably are illegal, but a calculation is made maximise revenue, and therefore not pursue them. To compare these schemes to paying duty free is a terrible comparison; the law on duty free sales (or purchases made overseas in a lower tax jurisdiction) is relatively clear. Choosing a complex tax arrangement that knowingly sails close to the wind, is a different matter entirely.

Again.....I didn't compare what Hamilton is doing to duty free.

I imagine it is extremely complex but that's why they're in power and we're not.

The law sets out what's legal and illegal, your moral conscious tells you what's right and what's wrong. If your earning megabucks and not prepared to pay into the society that helped raise you and educate you then in my estimation you fail the second test as Hamilton clearly does.

Totally agree Splod, there has to be some level of morality somewhere. Going back over 10 years ago the BBC’s Money Programme calculated then that Sir Philip Green, of BHS notoriety, and his family had ‘saved themselves’ £300m from their £1.2bn salary by living for a part of the year in Monaco, whose residents don’t pay income tax - just how much do people need.

Exactly, greed breeds greed. The thing is none of these people actually do any graft for their money in the first place.

It's entirely different. People like Lewis Hamilton are taking active steps to avoid paying millions of pounds in tax. Duty-free is not something that you plan for. I can't imagine Yubep is basing his summer holiday around doing his big shop at Terminal 2.

Not this year, the kids soon got sick of tobelerones n vodka.

Kids these days. Don't know they're born.

My summer nourishment were spare fingers of KitKats and the backwash of my Dad's Oranjeboom.

True about Murray, and when you look at the length of time a tennis player is on the tour or training in warm weather he could stop being a British resident without doing anything differently. Murray chooses to pay tax in the UK. He chooses to use straight accountants to keep his money in order rather than iffy investment advisers who exist solely to find and exploit offshore loopholes and then act as cover for their clients if they're exposed.

One scam they were running was for clients who wanted to pay for private schools to make a donation to an educational trust the amount of the school fees. They then applied to the trust for a scholarship - nobody who had made a donation was ever refused. Net result was the money came into the UK to pay the school fees but nobody paid tax on it because it was technically a scholarship from a trust. bet some of them even claimed tax relief on the 'donation'.

For me that is a clear fiddle. It should be made illegal and they should all be made to pay back dated tax because they were clearly fully aware that they were actively evading tax.