‘Tax havens are places where senior executives of the world’s largest financial and industrial corporations mix with figures from the artistic or social “jet-set”, together with multimillionaires who combine business with pleasure. They all rub shoulders with somewhat dubious individuals…’
Looks like Jeremy is leaving Top Gear so it’s the end of an era for us petrolheads. As homage to the self-confessed dinosaur, sadly now on the verge of extinction, I’m devoting this blog to performance car-related tax matters.
My book on VAT and property, published on Friday 13 February, was, like all legal commentaries, out-of-date before it even saw the light of day. Writing the book was like running after a bus that was always pulling away just as you arrived at the stop. A series of tax groundhog moments, if you like.
‘Taxman tries to spook children into paying up in the future with bizarre ‘pay your bills’ video depicting inspectors as ‘ghostbusters’’ (Daily Mail headline, 8 November 2014)
It’s not often that I find myself agreeing with the Daily Mail but, if what is being said in the press about this HMRC video is accurate, it certainly is bizarre.
It’s been quite a while since I did a tax round-up at the end of the year. Well, to be truthful, the only time was in December 2011 but I wanted to do it again. I thought I would ask my fellow tax warriors for their highlight(s) of 2014 and add my own thoughts to what they said. So that is exactly what I did …
‘I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.’ (Douglas Adams, ‘The Salmon of Doubt’)
In a moment of weakness I did a very stupid thing – I agreed to write a book on VAT and property transactions.
In June 2013, the EU VAT Forum, set up by the Commission in July 2012 to bring together VAT authorities and business, launched the VAT cross-border rulings (‘CBR’) pilot project.
On 17th September 2014 the European Court came to the ground-breaking and, to UK practitioners, somewhat surprising decision in Skandia America Corp. (USA), filial Sverige, v Skatteverket, that a non-EU company and its dependent branch in the EU cannot be treated as a single taxable person where the branch belongs to a VAT group.