BN66 - Time to fight back!!!

[Emigre]

New MP Scheme

Just received the letter from MP setting out details of the new scheme together with plenty of FAQs that appear to have been answered very openly.

I'm not going to discuss the detail on this board but I for one feel very positive about it. Look forward to other thoughts. It seems that there is a recent Special Commissioners hearing that found in favour of a similar scheme although not clear whether that case covered all relevant aspects.

One cautionary note though, MP will only take any legal challenge as far as the Court of Appeal. If challenged by IR the CoA will not be far enough. Any inclined to stay with scheme should consider putting say 1% away to fight with at a later date on a collective basis.

Enjoy the sun (except you, Mr B )

[BrilloPad]

Just received the letter from MP setting out details of the new scheme together with plenty of FAQs that appear to have been answered very openly.

I'm not going to discuss the detail on this board but I for one feel very positive about it. Look forward to other thoughts. It seems that there is a recent Special Commissioners hearing that found in favour of a similar scheme although not clear whether that case covered all relevant aspects.

One cautionary note though, MP will only take any legal challenge as far as the Court of Appeal. If challenged by IR the CoA will not be far enough. Any inclined to stay with scheme should consider putting say 1% away to fight with at a later date on a collective basis.

Enjoy the sun (except you, Mr B )

I did get this letter by email.

montp did not say if their loan scheme was superior to other loan schemes and if so why. hence I am still looking at limited. also I got no reply to my email to Andy Simpson.

also I am concerned that even if another case went well - HMRC have lots of dirty tricks. winning can take many years and lots of aggro.

The legal challenge is just for the loan scheme I think. My understanding was that the legal challenge for the double taxation would be up to ECHR - maybe I am wrong on this?

[BolshieBastard]

No such thing as Gift tax. Only inheritance tax if you die within seven years of giving the gift.


Those who owe the IR big and cant afford to pay can expect only one thing:

http://www.thespoof.com/news/spoof.c...dline=s1i39473

OK semantics calling it 'gift' tax but that's effectively what it is until you die then it becomes inheritance. See this;

"The £3000 limit is for Inheritance Tax (IHT). Each person can make a gift upto this limit each year free of IHT. In addition and for 1 year only, the unsed allowance from the previos tax year can be gifted in addition. These limits are per individual so a husband an wife with no prior transfers could give (2*£3000) £6000 each or £12000 in total initially.
Care is needed to ensure other taxes such as capital gains tax (CGT) are not triggered. Cash (Cheques) is not usually chargeable to CGT."

[poppy01]

One of my contacts in the scheme recently clubbed together with a few others to pay for a consultation with a firm of specialist Tax Consultants in the City. Their conclusion was that our best option was to remain part of Montpelier's group action. They didn't rate our chances of success very highly but they also weren't able to suggest a better strategy.

However, obviously they didn't have access to our resident expert!

any chance of a summary of their findings. Councils advice to Montpelier would seem to disagree with that. I'd put our chances of the Judicial review finding BN66 incompatible with the 98 human rights act at 100% because it simply is. then its on to the european courts. gives me two years to do some serious saving...

[poppy01]

from wikipedia

England and Wales
Main article: Judicial review in English Law
Judicial review is a procedure in English administrative law by which English courts supervise the exercise of public power. A person who feels that an exercise of such power by, say, a government minister, the local council or a statutory tribunal, is unlawful, perhaps because it has violated his or her rights, may apply to the Administrative Court (a division of the High Court) for judicial review of the decision. If the application for judicial review is successful, the Court may set aside (quash) the unlawful act. In certain limited circumstances, the Claimant may be able to obtain damages. A court may also make a mandatory or prohibitory order or an injunction to compel the authority to act lawfully or to stop it from acting unlawfully.

Unlike the United States and some other jurisdictions, English law does not know judicial review of primary legislation (laws passed by Parliament), save in limited circumstances where primary legislation is contrary to EU law (see Factortame). Although the Courts can review primary legislation to determine its compatibility with the Human Rights Act 1998, they have no power to quash or suspend the operation of an enactment which is found to be incompatible with the European Convention of Human Rights - they can merely declare that they have found the enactment to be incompatible.

[DonkeyRhubarb]

any chance of a summary of their findings. Councils advice to Montpelier would seem to disagree with that. I'd put our chances of the Judicial review finding BN66 incompatible with the 98 human rights act at 100% because it simply is. then its on to the european courts. gives me two years to do some serious saving...

It was only an initial consultation. They did not have the benefit of tax counsel opinion, so I think they were just expressing a view that it wasn't going to be easy to overturn primary legislation. That's why they advised sticking with MontP because it would be too costly to represent just a few people.

Does anyone know if MontP have agreed to cover all the costs up to and including ECHR?

PS. I just checked my original notes and MontP committed to covering all costs up to HoL but obviously at the time they were not expecting it to involve Europe.

[Emigre]

any chance of a summary of their findings. Councils advice to Montpelier would seem to disagree with that. I'd put our chances of the Judicial review finding BN66 incompatible with the 98 human rights act at 100% because it simply is. then its on to the european courts. gives me two years to do some serious saving...

Counsel opinion provided to a similar scheme provider (twentyplus) supports the MP counsel's opinion.

[DonkeyRhubarb]

Counsel opinion provided to a similar scheme provider (twentyplus) supports the MP counsel's opinion.

Have twentyplus (De Graaf) said how far they would challenge the legislation at no additional cost to the clients eg. ECHR?

I wonder if there can be multiple JR's or will MontP, De Graaf and others (eg. property developers) eventually have to stand side by side?

[mossman]

P'd off

I married at 20 and struggled to raise a family on a minimal wage. In my late 20s I got into IT, but first of all I didn’t earn a huge amount. In my mid 40s I discovered contracting. By now I didn’t have enough years of working life ahead of me to pay off a big mortgage, and I was too old for a Porsche, so I stayed in my 3 bed semi, bought a Ford Mondeo and started trying to save for my retirement. I had seen my parents and my wife’s parents starve in retirement on state pensions, and I wanted to try to make sure that didn’t happen to me.

All went well for a year or two, and then the loony-left Government dreamed up IR35. I was stung with a big assessment, which took all the money I had saved up to then. To add insult to injury, the guy sitting next to me on the client site at the time, doing exactly the same work, in the same way, had his contract assessed as not caught by IR35 (he lived in a different area – different tax inspector). So I had to pay 54% percent tax at the top end (40% income tax + 13% employers NI + 1% employee’s NI) while the other guy just had to pay his 20% corporation tax). And I would have to pay for any training courses out of my taxed income, whereas the other guy could claim tax relief on his. The tax inspector that I dealt with clearly didn’t understand the way we work. Because my contract had run for over a year, he seemed to think I was some kind of glorified office temp who had a job for life. Shortly after that I was out of work for 6 months. When I did get another contract it was for a quarter of the rate that I had been on when I was stung. He didn’t understand the financial implications of being caught either. These guys just know about their own little section of the rules. To us, this is about survival, to them it’s just a game based on a rulebook.

I took refuge in the Montpelier scheme, as it was the only way I could see, that I would take home enough to be able to save anything. Now HMRC are threatening to take every penny I have saved, and probably some extra that I haven’t got.

Now in my mid 50s I have to resign myself to the fact that I will probably have to work until the day I die. When I am too old to get IT contract work, I will have to cut grass for the council or whatever minimum wage job I can get.

It’s the equivalent of Mr Brannigan reaching retirement age, and then HMRC saying to him ‘Well you’ve done your 40 years, but we’ve decided not to pay your pension after all, so you’ll have to exist on the £ 87 a week state pension, alright mate?’

The Government talks about citizenship lessons for recent immigrants. Here’s one native-born, formerly patriotic citizen, who now doesn’t give a damn about this country. Well done Gordon.

It’s worth looking back at how we got here. Gordon Brown introduced a completely inequitable tax change called IR35. Before that we were taxed as businesses, which is what we are. Now, if I run a string of fish and chip shops and operate as a limited company, I pay 20% corporation tax on my profits. But if I am a freelance IT consultant operating as a limited company, the government pretends (purely for tax purposes) that I am an employee of my various clients, and I am expected to hand over 54% of the money I am slaving for, so that the government can give it away to asylum seekers and various other assorted pieces of human garbage. Perhaps, instead of getting an IT degree, I should have taken a course in fish frying?

I studied for years in my own time to get my qualifications. I took a huge risk leaving a secure job to become a freelancer. I work incredibly hard in a stressful, high pressure industry to provide the flexible resource that high tech companies need. I have fought my way around the M25 for years, with the inevitable jack-knifed lorries sometimes causing me to not get home until the early hours of the morning. I have survived a train derailment and a terrorist bomb on the tube. I have stayed away from home in cheap B&Bs, damaged my health and put a strain on my marriage. When the latest letter arrived from HMRC, my wife burst into tears saying “All we’ve been through over the last ten years, and now it could all been for nothing”.

Despite growing up on a council estate in a rough town, I have developed myself to the point where I am respected professional. I have worked hard to develop my skills. I am proud of my achievements. Brannigan can’t take away my achievements, even if he is able to take away the financial security that those achievements should have brought me and my family.

I use a private dentist and a private doctor. When my wife needed an operation last year, she didn’t use an NHS hospital (her mother went into an NHS hospital the previous year, caught MRSA and died). I would happily sign an undertaking never to use the NHS, never to claim any state benefits and not to claim the sad little state pension, if they would just STOP STEALING MY MONEY.

IR35 is very clearly not about trying to get us to make a fair contribution to the running of the country; we were already doing that. If I make a profit of 60K and pay 12K in corporation tax, that’s not a bad contribution for someone who is never going to use any of the so-called services that the state provides. IR35 is about destroying a section of the population who have developed skills that they can sell on the open market for an above-average income. They want to force us back into being relatively low-paid lifers on a fixed pay scale, preferably one negotiated by a union or dictated by the government.

If there is one thing that socialists hate more than the upper classes, it’s a working man who has prospered by his own intelligence and hard work. It blows the myth that the only way to achieve anything is to organise into a union and blackmail employers into paying you more than your skills are worth on the open market. In Russia the Bolsheviks murdered well over one million kulaks. A kulak was, basically, a peasant who wasn’t actually starving i.e. had prospered by his own efforts. These gross exercises in negativity based on the politics of envy always create massive problems for the country in which they are perpetrated. The mass murder of the kulaks contributed to the breakdown in Russian agriculture, which led to millions of Russians starving to death. Many of us work on government contracts, some probably for HMRC. The loss of productivity caused by the stress of having to defend ourselves against these constant attacks on our prosperity should not be underestimated. How many more tens of millions of pounds do they want to squander on failed government IT projects? Taking that into account, Gordon Brown will have made a massive loss out of IR35 and the resultant fallout.

Every generation produces a percentage of people with sociopathic personality disorders. That’s why the Nazis had no trouble finding people to staff the concentration camps, and it’s why Gordon Brown will have no trouble finding people like Brannigan to do his dirty work for him.

New Labour are obviously going to lose the next election, but by then they could have destroyed the lives of some of the most intelligent, hard working risk-taking entrepreneurs in the population.

No other group in society would put up with this. Let’s see Brannigan walk into the 1000 strong Irish Travellers camp at Crays Hill in Essex and demand they hand over to him all of the money they have stashed in their pre-fab houses. It’s time to stop being polite middle-class businesspeople. The time for whingeing is over. We need to organise into a proper group like the PCG, but just for people who are under threat from the retrospective legislation. We need to attack on various fronts: Lobbying, Investments to beat the 7.5%, Investigation of Escape Routes (I’m told there is no extradition treaty between the UK and Northern Cyprus), Direct Action (if French fisherman can blockade ports, and lorry drivers can block motorways, there is plenty we can do).

We don’t have to put up with this sh**.

[ChimpMaster]

OK semantics calling it 'gift' tax but that's effectively what it is until you die then it becomes inheritance. ....

Yes so it should be technically possible to put everything in your wife's name and have HMRC declare you bankrupt. I can't believe that transfers of wealth between spouses is limited to some kind of "gift" allowance... that would be ridiculous. For example, as part of simple tax planning I put nearly all my savings in my wife's account... because she is a lower rate tax payer. Now is that not allowed unless we pay additional so called "gift" tax... I wouldn't imagine so.

I've known well heeled businessmen who dilberately went bankrupt to avoid paying debts, and a few months later started the same business in their wife's name.

Anyway, it's just an idea that might be worth considering.