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Saturday, September 14, 2013

Charity by the rich for the rich

 The names of as many as 825 wealthy individuals who concealed £176 million in a charity tax scam could remain secret forever, a tribunal was told yesterday, according to reports.  Individuals are not named unless prosecuted and tax avoidance is perfectly legal.

The identities of the donors to the Cup Trust, a charity set up to generate millions of pounds in artificial gift aid, are so closely guarded that not even the charity regulator knows who they are. businessmen used a British Virgin Islands trust to dodge tax and claim gift aid relief. The trust bought £176 million-worth of Government gilts, which were sold to donors for only £17,000. The donors sold the gilts and donated the equivalent of the proceeds to the trust. Gift Aid of £46.4 million has been claimed on these donations by the trust.

By March 2011 the ‘charity’ had handed out £55,000 from the £176.5 million it had raised from ‘donors’. The Charity Commission insist the scam wasn’t really a scam anyway, since though Cup only paid out a few pence to token beneficiaries for every hundred quid it raised, there’s no statutory floor on charities’ donations-to-benefactions rate.

Another scheme run by a Matthew Jenner  generated income of £97,590. Expenses was £97,451.

 Someone can set up a family trust charity and put all sorts of expenses through it, so that 50%, 60% or 80% of income in that charity actually goes on supporting the family with cars, accommodation, secretaries.

The National Fraud Authority in March 2012 estimated that fraud in the charitable sector is at £1.1 billion. The number of charity trustees removed by the Charity Commission has been zero for 2011-12, zero for 2010-11, zero for 2009-10, one in 2008-09, and six in 2007-08. The number of trustees it has suspended in the past four years is four. An ineffectual and toothless sinecure.

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