Tax avoidance – supporting evidence for the Marxist Perspective on Crime

Last Updated on January 5, 2018 by Karl Thompson

One of they key ideas of Marxist criminologists is that the Law is made by the property owning Capitalist class and  serves their interests.

(NB You might like to review the perspective by reading this long-form post on the Marxist theory of crime more generally before continuing…)

The issue of tax avoidance, which means legally bending the rules to avoid paying tax, is one of the best examples of how the legal system surrounding tax is structured in such a way that allows the wealthy to set up ‘shell companies’ in tax-havens to avoid paying tax on their income and investments….

Such methods can only ever benefit the rich as you need to be quite wealthy to be able to afford the legal and accountancy fees associated with doing this, so these methods are not really available to average, or even moderately high income individuals.

Lewis Hamilton Tax Avoidance.png

To my mind, the most notorious example of a tax avoider from 2017 was Lewis Hamilton, who used the ‘off shore’ method to get a £3 million VAT rebate on his £16 million private jet.

The Lewis Hamilton story was revealed as part of the ‘Paradise Papers’ leak – which consists of 13.4 million documents from offshore legal service providers such as Appleby covering seven decades, from 1950 to 2016. Tax-dodging is a very common practice by the wealthy!

Focussing on Corporate Tax Dodgers rather than individuals…

Corporate Tax Dodgers: the UK’s Worst Offenders – This article lists Google and Gary Barlow (or rather the Corporate entity ‘Take That’ as among the UK’s worst tax-dodgers, although it doesn’t distinguish between tax evasion (which is illegal) and tax avoidance (which isn’t)… I especially love the fact that it was put together (as basically an advert) by an accountancy firm in the North East of England – one of England’s poorest regions and thus the most likely to suffer from lower government revenue to tax dodging.

On a similar theme this Daily Mail article outlines with more clarity the Corporations avoiding Tax – including some very big names such as Café Nero and Vodafone, and LOTS more!

 

 

 

 

 

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