Under pressure from a deeply unhappy David Cameron, the Tories’ ‘trustafarian millionaire’ candidate for Richmond Park, Zac Goldsmith, has at long last pledged to end his non-dom status with immediate effect – his original plan, before the row sparked by the original Sunday Times revelations, was to become a full UK taxpayer next year.
But you’ve got to love this ‘man of the people’ quote from his spokesman, who, when asked how much the change in tax status would cost Mr Goldsmith, replied:
The benefits were very marginal. I don’t know if it is £10 or £10,000.”
Hat-tip: the Evening Standard’s Paul Waugh.
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If it was of marginal benefit, why bother? Hmm.
Priceless. Well, £10k is obviously no price for someone like Zac…
His accountants must be pretty useless if they can’t pin down the figure more closely than that. Or is this mor smoke and mirrors on Goldsmith’s behalf? A neat soundbite like that deflects more rigorous questioning by lazy journalists.
Hmm, I suspect that the tax on income from a £200m fortune would be rather more than £10 000 or else I’d be asking questions of my investment advisors if I were him.
Unless of course he is just going to use other tax avoidance measures to avoid paying all the tax he would otherwise have to
Does this mean that he will also pay the going rate for rent for the house which he lives in?
Houses, surely?
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[...] local difficulty by shrugging off a tax saving of £10,000 as if it essentially the same thing as a tenner he might lose down the back of a sofa. This was a highly charged political statement. What he was saying was: “I’m safe and I [...]