Should I be Optimistic, Realistic or Pessimistic?
"To make a decision in our favour would have been a seminal moment in legal history".
Quite, so we should not have been encouraging each other with ever more optimistic posts. The judge appears to have summed up the case as succinctly as possible given the complexities, and we should ignore childish comments about the judge 'being got at'. This isn't a game and it isn't a television show and it isn't taking place in Sicily.
I was told when I joined the scheme that, in the event of a challenge from HMRC, Montpelier (MTM as it was then) would take the case to as high a court as necessary and that is exactly what they are doing. They must be incurring considerable costs.
There were never any guarantees that the arrangement would work going forward but I think that the retrospective nature of the HMRC attack is unprecedented and unfair. This retrospective aspect could change the entire taxation landscape, in the future and in the past, for all UK citizens. This would include BBC correspondants who could find their agreed expense allowances, disallowed 23 years later.
We must all now accept that there is a strong possibility of the final outcome going against us and we therefore need to save as much as we can to cover our potential liabilities. I know that many of you will disagree with this and indeed, without a background in Law, it is impossible to calculate the percentage chance we have of winning.
I hope that Montpelier's lawyers can find some issues with the judge's comments and that we have solid grounds for appeal but we would all do well not to be blindly optimistic.
The 'tax dodgers' headline beggars believe and has made me very angry when everything we have done has been explained and documented every year on our self assessment forms. Contrast that with MPs duck pond expenses.
"To make a decision in our favour would have been a seminal moment in legal history".
Quite, so we should not have been encouraging each other with ever more optimistic posts. The judge appears to have summed up the case as succinctly as possible given the complexities, and we should ignore childish comments about the judge 'being got at'. This isn't a game and it isn't a television show and it isn't taking place in Sicily.
I was told when I joined the scheme that, in the event of a challenge from HMRC, Montpelier (MTM as it was then) would take the case to as high a court as necessary and that is exactly what they are doing. They must be incurring considerable costs.
There were never any guarantees that the arrangement would work going forward but I think that the retrospective nature of the HMRC attack is unprecedented and unfair. This retrospective aspect could change the entire taxation landscape, in the future and in the past, for all UK citizens. This would include BBC correspondants who could find their agreed expense allowances, disallowed 23 years later.
We must all now accept that there is a strong possibility of the final outcome going against us and we therefore need to save as much as we can to cover our potential liabilities. I know that many of you will disagree with this and indeed, without a background in Law, it is impossible to calculate the percentage chance we have of winning.
I hope that Montpelier's lawyers can find some issues with the judge's comments and that we have solid grounds for appeal but we would all do well not to be blindly optimistic.
The 'tax dodgers' headline beggars believe and has made me very angry when everything we have done has been explained and documented every year on our self assessment forms. Contrast that with MPs duck pond expenses.
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