can pay, won’t pay
Have you heard the one about Chelsea having already sacked their new manager, AVB’s replacement! The other newsworthy footie story of late which appears to have polarised public opinion is the tax evasion charge levelled against ‘our ‘Arry’.
It’s easy to see why HM Revenue & Customs went after Harry Redknapp. Here was a high profile individual (I intentionally avoid the term celebrity), living the life many would aspire to, handling countless millions of the Chairman’s money and operating in the apparently lawless world of brown paper bungs, backhanders, nods and winks. Having established both Redknapp and Milan Mandaric were using off-shore accounts the HMRC chose to make a very public example of the two of them, hoping the ripple effect would bring everyone else to account. To the Revenue it must have appeared an open and shut case.
Such an open and shut case, chasing Redknapp for an alleged £186,000, ended up taking over five years to bring to court, cost the taxpayer several millions of pounds and tied up the time of dozens of expensive tax accountants and specialists. His misfortune was that he was a private (albeit very public) individual and not a multinational corporate company. This prevented him from developing the cosy ‘sweetheart’ deals the likes of Topman, Vodafone, Kraft and Goldman Sachs have. At the last count, HMRC were in dispute with these companies over some £25bn (that’s £25,000,000,000 in real money) of unpaid taxes.
Now, I’m not arguing for one second that Redknapp shouldn’t have been investigated, and he certainly didn’t come out of the whole affair smelling of roses. The fact that he admitted he can hardly read or write and has never in his life written a letter or email further denigrates our celebrity culture but the taxman’s inconsistent and entirely out of all proportion treatment isn’t just ridiculous and missing the point it hinders the efficient collection of taxes and allows the true perpetrators of tax evasion to escape with impunity.
