Offshore tax havens and football

A great piece in today's Sunday Times about "Top football clubs flee to tax havens".

I've blogged before the disgustingly obscene wages that todays footballers get paid in the top flight.

However, thanks to The Sunday Times we now discover that almost three quarters of the football clubs in the Premiership league are based in offshore tax havens.

Direct from the Sunday Times:

"An examination of filings at Companies House by a chartered accountant found that 14 Premier League clubs, 5 championship clubs, 2 Scottish clubs and Hartlepool, a league one club, are based offshore."

Here are some of the clubs and where they are run from:

Fulham FC - Bermuda
Ipswich Town - Bermuda
Blackburn Rovers - Jersey
Tottenham Hotspur - Bahamas
Sunderland - Jersey
Portsmouth - British Virgin Islands
Manchester United - Nevada

British football clubs are becoming an attractive target for wealthy business owners - although it would be much better if these people retained an interest in sport, specifically football rather than an unhealthy attraction to balance sheets.

Mike Warburton, a senior tax partner at Grant Thornton is quoted as saying: the biggest advantage of going offshore was that it allowed a wealthy owner to pour income that had not been taxed in the UK into British clubs.

My reply would be, and so it would if they paid tax here too!

This discussion then moves onto image rights - a headache in itself.

There are arguments for and against in the article, and it is truly a good read.

The Megrahi row continues

Wow, just as you think the row over Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi's release on compassionate grounds to go back home to Libya to see out the rest of his live is about to fizzle out - BANG - the Sunday Times releases details of leaked letters between Jack Straw and Kenny MacAskill.

The Sunday Times says "The correspondence makes it plain that the key decision to include Megrahi in a deal with Libya to allow prisoners to return home was, in fact, taken in London for British national interests."

Jack Straw is trying to brush this away by saying this is all "academic" now as the decision was made on compassionate grounds not under the prisoner transfer agreement.

The oil agreement was ratified some 6 weeks before but Jack Straw was also quick to pint out that the Scottish Government could have vetoed any move to send al-Megrahi home under the transfer agreement. The BBC website is also carrying the story this morning.

So, the row goes on and I suspect will do so now for some weeks, if not months.