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Diary

Michael Winner

Wednesday, 31st October 2007

Michael Winner on his dealings with the revenue and his diet book

Years ago my learned tax lawyer, Ron Downhill of Berwin Leighton Paisner (commission please, Ron, if you get any business from this), agreed this was a good thing. For four years the Special Compliance Office put a wonderful man on my case who was determined to show it was tax evasion. At the end the Revenue agreed it wasn’t. Thus I got tax clearance for over 100 of these rollover schemes, nearly all operated by famous banks. They’d never bothered to get it. They just took their commission and smiled. Ron said to me some time ago, ‘Why bring in money and lose 25 per cent of it, when if you borrowed against your Guernsey shares, you’d only be paying, at most, 1 per cent more than you’re already getting?’ So now I’m borrowing against anything. Including my mansion in Holland Park which I conservatively estimate is worth £35 million. If you shop around, interest rates vary massively. A bank manager asked, ‘Why do you want to borrow £2 million?’ I replied, ‘Because my income has diminished near to zero and I’m sitting opposite my beloved fiancée who refuses to go to work.’ I know Shakespeare said, ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be.’ But he didn’t have money in a Channel Islands rollover account.

Now to another, more bizarre, financial matter. I’m sure you remember my last Spectator Diary when I told you of tax inspector Colin Kain, who works for the North East Metropolitan Area Complex Personal Return Team in Tyne and Wear. Mr Kain took what I considered a near-lunatic view that when I paid for meals in my role as food critic for the Sunday Times, as I had to eat to live, it showed a duality of purpose which meant such expenses were not deductible. No other food critic in the land was thus afflicted. Already six senior tax inspectors had agreed to what I was doing, as they do for all other food critics. But Mr Kain is in a world of his own. He even suggested that if I was not hungry and then had a meal to write about, he might consider it deductible! The Special Compliance office had gone into everything, left no stone unturned, when I voluntarily told them I’d put a few quid in Switzerland when tax was 75 per cent on earned income and 98 per cent on savings and I now wished to atone for it. That was settled amicably.

Just when I thought all was over, up pops Colin Kain, tax inspector extraordinary. His first probing letter was dated 6 October 2005. The matter was settled on 5 October 2007. Two years of endless haggling on most minor points, none of which (and I can’t understand how Kain didn’t see this) would produce one penny extra tax for the Revenue or the nation. Unless I unexpectedly earn millions in the future, it never will.

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