A major vulnerability in the Companies House website gave unauthorised access to the private dashboard of any of the five million registered companies for five months. It exposed directors’ home addresses and email addresses, and enabled attackers to change company and director details – and even file accounts.
This article sets out what we know, what we don’t, and what businesses should be doing to protect themselves. Updated 17 March 2026 with Companies House letter.
What is now confirmed:
Unauthorised access to any company’s dashboard
Vulnerability existed since October 2025
Bad actors could access non-public personal data
Bad actors could file accounts and company/director changes
What remains unconfirmed:
Whether it was exploited by criminals
Whether Companies House can identify affected companies
The vulnerability
It’s incredibly simple, and involves just pressing the “back” key at a particular time.
The vulnerability was discovered on Thursday 12 March by John Hewitt at Ghost Mail, a corporate services provider. He tried to contact Companies House immediately, but didn’t get a response – so he contacted us. This is a video of the Zoom call when John first demonstrated the vulnerability to me (edited only to redact personal information):
John used the vulnerability to view the private Companies House dashboard of ClarityDW Ltd, a digital communications consultancy owned by Jonathan Phillips. Jonathan kindly gave us permission to do this.1
John then used it to view the dashboard of a company I own, and to modify my own registered address. That appeared to work, as it generated a confirmation number. As you will hear, I was incredulous at what John showed me.
I then spoke to computer security specialists. To rule out the possibility that it was something specific to John’s computer, network or account, I tested the vulnerability myself (again using Jonathan’s company as the target):
This shows the exploit revealing private information that’s not published by Companies House, such as personal email addresses and full dates of birth (and you can see that in the video, with Jonathan’s personal information masked).
These are precisely the kinds of data used for fraud: impersonation, phishing, identity checks, and social engineering – particularly targeting directors of small companies (as large companies generally have systems that mean one person alone cannot authorise payments).
I therefore alerted Companies House immediately. They responded swiftly by shutting down the e-filing system, and only after that did we (and the FT) publish this story.
How the exploit works
When John first contacted me, I assumed this was a highly technical exploit or “hack”. It was nothing of the sort.
All that was required was to log in to Companies House using your own details and access your own company’s dashboard. Then opt to “file for another company” and enter the company number for any one of the five million companies registered with Companies House. At that point you’d be asked for an authentication code, which of course you don’t have. No problem. Press the “back” key a few times to return to your dashboard. Except – it isn’t your dashboard. It’s the other company’s dashboard.
Anybody wishing to take advantage of the exploit could, for £100, incorporate their own company and obtain dashboard access (and there are various ways this could be done without leaving any trace back to those responsible).
Does the exploit enable modification of company data?
In the first video, you can see John changing my own registered address for a company (this was with my permission, and it needed changing anyway). The change appeared to go through, and we saw this confirmation:
There are two notable things here. First, we received a submission number. The technical experts we spoke to said that, whilst it was possible the edit was not really going through, the fact we saw a submission number suggested that it was. Second, the copy of the confirmation was emailed to John, and not to me (even though it was my company):
This is extremely dangerous, because it means that any company that falls victim to this exploit would not receive a warning email.2
We concluded from this that any filings could be made for any company, including changing registered office, director names/addresses, and filing accounts.
Has the vulnerability been exploited?
We don’t know. Five months is a long time for a vulnerability this serious to remain live. Research suggests that newly discovered vulnerabilities are, on average, exploited within 15 days.
The security experts we spoke to thought that, if the exploit had been live for longer than a few days, then there was a high chance that bad actors had discovered it.3 It could then have been sold to an organised group (on Telegram or the “dark web”).
It would be technically straightforward to scrape the hidden personal details of the directors of all five million companies, but sophisticated bad actors would expect that to trigger alerts at Companies House. A sophisticated criminal group would probably not use this exploit in the most obvious way. They would use it carefully, selectively, and for profit.
The experts we spoke to identified these as more likely uses of the exploit:
Use open source research to identify individuals vulnerable to identity fraud – and this would be more likely to be directors of small companies than billionaires. Then use the exploit to find their personal data – but limit this to hundreds of companies rather than millions.
If the exploit really does enable modification, then identify small companies that could plausibly borrow large amounts from banks, and change their details so that the criminals can open bank accounts and borrow in the name of those companies. This would be carried out on a small scale – say 20 companies each week borrowing £50,000 each. It would take some time for banks and/or authorities to realise that this was more than “conventional” fraud by e.g. forging signatures and intercepting post.
Companies House’s response
We told Companies House of the vulnerability as soon as we became aware of it; soon afterwards, the web filing system shut down, presenting this error message, and this on the “service availability” page:
On Monday 16 March, Companies House published a full statement revealing that the vulnerability had been live for five months.
And on 17 March, Companies House sent an email to every company in the UK:
I am a little concerned that this is minimising what happened:
Saying the vulnerability “could only have been exploited by a logged-in user performing a specific set of actions” downplays the ease of bad actors gaining a Companies House login (very easy: just pay £100 to incorporate a company).
The “specific set of actions” sounds like it was something very obscure, when actually it was just pressing the “back” key four times. Given there are five million companies, and the vulnerability was present for five months, it would be surprising if it wasn’t discovered by accident on multiple occasions. The key question is whether it was ignored or exploited.
“It is not a cyber-attack” is true but is failing to disclose the actual risk – that the vulnerability could have been used to modify company data and then engineer a fraud on that company or its commercial counterparties/lenders.
It leaves open the question of whether Companies House actually can ascertain if the vulnerability was used to access or modify data. The security experts we spoke to thought that, if Companies House had standard audit logging in place, it should be able to see which logged-in accounts accessed unrelated companies’ dashboards, when that happened, and whether they then attempted filings or changes. That ought to make at least some retrospective investigation possible.
What happens next
There are obvious security and GDPR implications of revealing directors’ home and email addresses for millions of companies. All the more so if nobody knows which companies were impacted by the vulnerability.
because this is a “high risk breach“, to notify all those affected “without undue delay”. The general alert (as above) partly satisfies that, but if Companies House becomes aware that any company’s specific data was accessed or modified then they would be required to notify that company.
We expect the Information Commissioner’s Office would take this very seriously, although its usual policy is not to fine public authorities.
What should businesses be doing?
At the present time we have no idea if the exploit was used by bad actors (or indeed just pranksters).
It would seem very sensible for all companies to check their Companies House data and make sure it is as they expect.
Thanks most of all to John Hewitt at Ghost Mail. I hope he receives formal thanks from Companies House.
Thanks to Jonathan Phillips for helping verify the vulnerability, and allowing his own company to be used as a guinea pig.
Thanks to P, T and K for their computer security expertise, and B for Computer Misuse Act advice.
Footnotes
Any “penetration testing” of Companies House has to be conducted very carefully because of the potential to commit a criminal offence, under either the Companies Act or the Computer Misuse Act. Neither has a public interest defence. In our case, access was authorised (by me and Jon) so no offence is committed under the Computer Misuse Act, and whilst John did modify my company data, the modification resulted in accurate data being submitted to Companies House. ↩︎
We couldn’t immediately see if our test change was effective, because it normally takes around 24 hours for changes to be reflected in the dashboard – and the dashboard was shut down almost immediately afterwards. As of Monday 16 March, the dashboard is back up, and this change has not gone through. However that may be because the specific change we made was blocked by Companies House; their email (below) confirms that changes could be made. ↩︎
The “easy” nature of the exploit paradoxically means that the usual automated vulnerability scanners would probably not detect it; however the number of bad actors routinely using Companies House for nefarious purposes means that they could just have discovered it the same way John did. ↩︎
MP Estate Planning1 is an unregulated advisory firm using an extensive socialmedia campaign to sell expensive “asset protection trusts” to elderly homeowners, often of relatively modest means.
The pitch is simple: put your home into a trust and you can avoid inheritance tax, care home fees, divorce claims and creditors. Our investigation, drawing on the expertise of over a dozen specialist lawyers and tax advisers, found that the claims are false – and may leave families facing large tax bills and, ultimately, cause a complex and expensive probate process.
We were disappointed but not surprised to find trusts being missold – that’s been going on for years. What we found was much worse – a firm that operates on the edge of legality, and may step over the line. A series of misrepresentations as to what it is and what it does, and advice to clients that goes beyond “merely wrong” into shocking negligence. And when we asked MP Estate Planning for comment, they failed to provide any response to our technical criticisms, and provided answers to other points that we consider to have been intentionally misleading.
The length of this report reflects the seriousness of what our investigation found.
The problems with MP Estate Planning
It all starts with a lack of expertise. The firm’s founder, Mike Pugh, says he is an “estate planning lawyer”. He isn’t. The firm’s website says it employs “experienced lawyers”. That is also untrue. We believe nobody at MP Estate Planning has any legal, tax or accounting qualifications.
The lack of expertise doesn’t stop the firm marketing its business very aggressively. It has over 400 videos on social media pushing an alarmist message: “if you own anything, it can be taken from you”. Pugh says their mission is “quite literally to save the middle class from being completely wiped out in the UK”. The solution is simple: “every home in a trust” – and they’re pushing this proposition to elderly people with assets of as little as £150,000:
The firm’s videos and website make a variety of striking claims:
You put your house and other assets in trust. They’re then outside your estate for inheritance tax purposes.
There are no adverse tax consequences of this.
The trust will reduce probate costs.
Your house won’t be assessed in determining whether you have to contribute towards care home fees (should they be needed).
You can financially support your children after you die, but if they divorce then their spouse will have no claim on their assets.
Assets in the trust are safe from your creditors, and can’t be touched if you go bankrupt.
All these claims are false. The Society of Will Writers has published guidance telling its members not to make these kinds of claims. The Association of Lifetime Lawyers has published a report demonstrating the damage caused by unregulated providers making claims like this.
Our investigation uncovered multiple serious problems with MP Estate Planning’s claims and business practices.
Lifetime trusts are poor tax planning for most people. They often result in more inheritance tax because the spouse exemption and residence nil rate bands aren’t available to trusts.
The MP Estate Planning structures we reviewed have no material tax benefit and likely trigger a series of unnecessary tax bills.
One experienced adviser told us that the tax claims made by MP Estate Planning were so egregiously bad that they looked like fraud (although most of our team believe the firm is just unqualified and reckless).2
They publish hundreds of videos which include multiple legal errors, often referring to US law concepts that have no equivalent in the UK. Their website is full of false claims and appears to be largely AI generated.
The firm claims the backing of an eminent KC, James Kessler, who told us he’s never given it, and in fact told MP Estate Planning to stop using his name.
MP Estate Planning claim their “head of legal”, and Mike Pugh’s mentor, is Dr Paul Hutchinson, who “trained with Kessler for 20 years”. In fact MP Estate Planning have never had a “head of legal”, or indeed any legally qualified staff at all. Dr Hutchinson told us he has never met Mr Kessler, and has never had any dealings with MP Estate Planning.
It appears that the firm is drafting property trusts for its clients, despite not employing qualified lawyers. If so, that’s potentially a criminal offence. And we’ve seen trust deeds that include very basic but highly significant errors.
Mike Pugh’s previous firm, Maplebrook Wills Ltd, went bust owing £1.7m to HMRC – an extraordinarily large amount for a small will-writing business. Mike Pugh’s actions are currently being investigated by the company’s liquidator.
We therefore believe MP Estate Planning is misselling trusts to people who probably do not need them and who are unprepared for the legal and tax complexities these structures create. Bad inheritance tax planning usually remains hidden until the taxpayer dies, decades after the planning was put in place. It is the taxpayer’s grieving children who are then left to pick up the pieces.
A prominent Scottish law firm failed in 2021 after selling unsuitable “family protection trusts”. Its pitch was similar to MP Estate Planning – but at least it was regulated, and so its clients had the prospect of recovering their loss. MP Estate Planning is completely unregulated, and anyone let down by its trusts will have no recourse at all.
We will be referring the firm to the Solicitors Regulation Authority for carrying on reserved legal activities without authorisation. We hope that HMRC investigates the firm for failing to disclose tax avoidance schemes.
Technical terms in this article
Trust
A legal arrangement where the legal ownership of assets (held by trustees) is separated from the beneficial ownership (those entitled to benefit).
A trust where the settlor (or their spouse/civil partner) can still benefit from the trust assets. This has major tax implications, such as the denial of certain tax reliefs.
An anti-avoidance rule where someone gives away an asset but continues to benefit from it (like giving away a house but still living in it). For inheritance tax purposes, the asset remains in their estate.
A tax on the profit when you sell or dispose of an asset that has increased in value. Transfers into trusts often count as a disposal for CGT purposes.
A tax relief that allows the deferral of Capital Gains Tax when giving away certain assets (like business assets or transfers into trusts), passing the potential tax liability to the recipient.
When someone intentionally reduces their assets (e.g., by putting a house in a trust) to qualify for state-funded social care. Local authorities can assess them as if they still owned the assets.
Before we present the products sold by MP Estate Planning, and the reasons why they don’t work, there are numerous red flags that in our opinion indicate this is not a business to be trusted.
Deceptive claims about their expertise
Mike Pugh says he’s a “tax lawyer” and an “estate planning lawyer”:
He isn’t. Mike Pugh worked as a Will writer after emigrating from Canada to the UK. He set up MP Estate Planning in 2023, but has no UK legal, tax or accounting qualifications. It’s an offence to hold yourself out as a solicitor or barrister, but the term “lawyer” is not legally protected – we nevertheless regard it as highly misleading for someone with no legal qualifications to claim to be a lawyer.
The MP Estate Planning website said they are a firm of “experienced lawyers” – this is untrue. We can’t identify anyone at MP Estate Planning who has any legal, tax or accounting qualifications. Neither any of the staff nor the firm itself is regulated. When we asked MP Estate Planning about this we didn’t get a response; they just changed the website.
Here’s the, fairly typical, CV of one of their representatives: he worked in sales until nine months ago, and now claims to be an “estate planning consultant” who can “specialise in delivering advanced, compliant and highly tailored estate planning solutions”:
In reality he’s still working in sales, just with a different job title.
It takes three to five years to train to be a chartered accountant and two years to train to be a chartered tax adviser. MP Estate Planning tell their salespeople they can earn £20,000 per month after three weeks’ training. That would be less concerning if all they did was sales; but they tell potential clients they’re “consultants”, and we’ve seen multiple cases where the salespeople claim to be qualified to give advice.
Nobody else involved appears to have any relevant qualifications. Dan Irwin, MP Estate Planning’s “head of property” was previously a director of Safe Hands Plans Ltd, a pre-paid funeral plan business which collapsed in 2022, with 46,000 people losing most of their money. Two individuals who ran the business are currently being prosecutedforfraud. There is no suggestion Mr Irwin was involved in the fraud, and we don’t know if the fraud was underway when Mr Irwin ceased to be a director in April 2018.3
The website says they work with a solicitors firm called Feakes & Co – but the firm told us that, whilst they provide some “corporate advice” to MP Estate Planning, their role “does not include designing or drafting trust structures or other such documents for them or their clients”.
MP Estate Planning told us that “Where a client’s circumstances require specialist or regulated advice, we refer or signpost to appropriately qualified external professionals”. However, there’s no sign that the trust deeds we reviewed were drafted by an external firm – the only firm mentioned on them is Feakes & Co, apparently because they undertake trust registrations.
Here’s another example of how MP Estate Planning recruits sales personnel:
Our view is that a highly incentivised sales team operating with no tax/legal qualified staff is extremely dangerous.
Deceptive claims about their legal team
Mike Pugh describes his “head of legal” in numerous videos. There isn’t one. MP Estate Planning has never had a lawyer on its team:
We asked Pugh about this. He responded:
“You raise the point about references in video material to a “head of legal”. This refers to the involvement of legally trained professionals within the wider advisory ecosystem we work with, rather than suggesting a formal internal role that does not exist.”
That is a very unconvincing explanation of what we would characterise as a lie.
Mike Pugh often claims an association with James Kessler KC, often rated as one of the country’s leading private client advisers, and Dr Paul Hutchinson, a respected Will writer (with a PhD in Law), who appears to be the man he’s saying is his (non-existent) “head of legal”:
First video: “We use the Kessler 15th edition, James Kessler KC. I’ve actually had emails with him allowing me to use the precedents. He’s a lovely man. He’s the number one guy for taxes and trusts worldwide, period. I’ll just throw a shout out to my mentor, Dr. Paul Hutchinson, who I’ve worked closely with for 10 years. Paul trained under Kessler for 20 years. So we’re pretty comfortable with our technical capabilities.”
Second video: “At MP Estate Planning UK, our head of legal is a doctor of law specialising in taxes and trusts.”
Mr Kessler is the lead author of a well known practitioners’ textbook on Wills and trusts, which includes trust and Will precedents. He has never met Dr Hutchinson, much less trained him for 20 years. The claim that MP Estate Planning had some kind of special permission to use the precedents is false – and that plus other uses of his name sufficiently alarmed Mr Kessler that he includes a warning on his website:
MP Estate Planning (UK)
This company have been marketing themselves as Kessler Will UK and as providing “Kessler Wills”. This has been done without James’ permission.
James has no association with this company. He does not endorse this company or any of their so-called “Kessler Wills”. He does not vouch for any product offered by this company.
On 10 November 2025 the company has, through its directors, entered into formal undertakings including not to use or refer to the name Kessler and/or to use or refer to “Kessler Wills”.
If anyone is aware of them using the name Kessler or the phrase “Kessler Will”, or holding themselves out as being associated or endorsed by James, please let us know at the email address on this website
In all cases, James strongly recommends you take advice only from solicitors or accountants who are qualified and regulated.
Dr Hutchinson told us he used to provide in-house training for Pugh’s previous firm Maplebrook Wills. He lent the firm some money, and became a shareholder to try to recover it – but then Maplebrook Wills went bust and he was never repaid. He says he’s had nothing to do with Mr Pugh since:
I wish to have no association with Mr Pugh or his company and do not consider myself his mentor… for the record I have never met Mr Kessler let alone “trained under him”. I have his texts as reference material, but that is it.”
We can’t find any evidence that MP Estate Planning has a “head of legal”, but it certainly isn’t Dr Hutchinson.
MP Estate Planning continued pushing out marketing containing falsehoods even when they knew this report was about to be released. This was sent to their mailing list the day before we published:
Every senior politician does not have a trust. Trusts are poor tax planning for most people. So it is therefore unsurprising that the List of Ministers’ Interests and the Register of Members’ Interests show only a small number of politicians declaring family trusts. We cannot know for sure, but we are very sceptical that MP Estate Planning has any senior politician as a client.
These claims – particularly the “head of legal” and “trained under Kessler for 20 years” were more than slips of the tongue, or the typical exaggeration of a salesman. They were concrete claims, made repeatedly. Mr Pugh surely knew the claims were was false. It is not far-fetched to suggest that a criminal offence may have been committed here.4
A deceptive website
The MP Estate Planning website has several elements we regard as deceptive.
First, the claimed associations and awards are untrue and misleading.
We spoke to the Chartered Insurance Institute. They’ve never heard of Mike Pugh or MP Estate Planning, and neither are members of (or have any association) with the Chartered Insurance Institute.
Pugh told us:
Some of our colleagues are members or graduates of the Chartered Insurance Institute include Mr Zubair Abad.
There is no formal relationship with the Institute itself. We have amended the wording on our website to more accurately reflect this.
Zubair Abad does not appear to be a member of the CII. It is possible he has CII qualifications. The wording on the website now says MP Estate Planning is “Aligned with or members of” the CII and other organisations. That still seems to us to be misleading.
Second, the claimed award from “Legal Directorate” was phony. Legal Directorate is a “pay for play” directory which uses AI to generate fake reviews and fake awards, with listings of “best firms” that (with respect to the firms listed) are not credible:
At some point someone paid for an entry/award for Mike Pugh’s old firm, Maplebrook Wills. When he set up MP Estate Planning Ltd, it “inherited” the fake award, but Legal Directorate never changed the url – it’s still “https://legaldirectorate.co.uk/company/maplebrook-wills-441174401555-weston-super-mare/“, with reviews that are likely fake/AI generated.5
Since we asked about this, the “Legal Directorate” badge disappeared from the MP Estate Planning website.
Poor understanding of English law and UK tax
The MP Estate Planning videos and websites show a very limited understanding of UK tax and the English6 law of trusts. Here’s Mike Pugh last month:
“Never transfer your assets into your kids’ names, especially real estate. Here’s why.
Let’s say you bought a home many years ago for £300,000, and now it’s worth £900,000.
If you transfer or dispose of the property, you could trigger a capital gains charge, and your children might be responsible for paying a charge on the £600,000 of gain.
There are workarounds. For example, if your children move in and live with you, then you may be able to transfer the property to them without triggering the capital gains tax, as long as you continue to qualify for the main residence relief or private residence relief.
An easier solution than living together is to set up a trust and put your house into the trust and name your adult children as trustees and beneficiaries.
If you want to protect your home and see it safely get to your kids, click on the link in the description to watch my free master class on how to put assets into trust in the UK.”
This is nonsense from start to finish. If it’s your home, then the main residence exemption usually applies – so there’s no capital gains tax if you give the property to your kids. If it wasn’t your main residence then there would be CGT, but on you and not your kids. Having the children live with you wouldn’t change the result in any way.
When we wrote to MP Estate Planning for comment in advance of publication (see below), their explanation for this video was that “the editing of the short-form clip conveyed the point poorly and could lead to confusion”. This is not credible. The statements above are complete propositions expressed in full sentences; they are not the product of an ambiguous or misleading edit. We put this to Mr Pugh; we didn’t receive a response.
It is hard to see any explanation for this video other than that Mr Pugh had no understanding of basic UK tax principles.
A series of errors
There are other basic errors and false claims in the many videos published by MP Estate Planning.
A video on cryptocurrency claims “certain reforms by the Labour Party may lead to increased tax guidelines on digital assets. This could impact how they are taxed during transfers and inheritances” – but there are no planned or announced changes to the UK tax treatment of cryptocurrency.
There are lots of small errors like this that we regard as “tells” – signs that Pugh and his colleagues don’t understand their subject. Then there are some very large errors – the firm seems to believe that English law is similar to US law, when it very much is not.
Confusion between UK tax and US tax
Mike Pugh frequently talks about “revocable trusts” and “irrevocable trusts”. These are US tax terms, which no competent UK adviser would use:
This isn’t a one-off. Multiple videos on MP Estate Planning’s YouTube channel, and dozens of pages on their website, discuss revocable and irrevocable trusts. In this video, Pugh claims that revocable trusts avoid probate and are “commonly used in estate planning”. They do not and they are not. Indeed American citizens who move to the UK are usually advised to terminate revocable trusts, because of the uncertainty as to how the UK system characterises them:
In this video, Pugh says that “revocable and irrevocable is more to do with tax status” and that you can “close” an irrevocable trust with an “advancement of the trust period”. None of this has any meaning in English law.
And this, from “frequently asked questions” on the MP Estate Planning website, suggests the firm is actually setting up “revocable trusts” for their clients:
We asked MP Estate Planning about this. Mike Pugh told us:
“You have identified instances where legacy or internationally sourced educational material has used terminology more commonly associated with US trust law.
Where those terms have appeared on UK-facing pages, we agree that they are not the correct terminology for English law and we are reviewing and updating older content accordingly.”
This appears to be untrue. This wasn’t “legacy or internationally sourced material”. It was Mike Pugh speaking in their own videos, for a UK audience, mixing up UK and US concepts in the same video.
A website full of “AI slop”
The MP Estate Planning website has hundreds of pages containing false claims about English law and UK tax:
This page says the first step of probate is to submit the Will to a probate court. There is no “probate court” in the UK – you apply for probate using a form or online. Courts only become involved in contested cases. A dozenpages on the MP Estate Planning website used to refer to probate court, in the context of UK probate. Since we wrote to MP Estate Planning, these have been changed.
A page on “asset protection trusts” says that life interest trusts and interest in possession trusts don’t trigger immediate inheritance tax charges – that is incorrect.
This page on “settlor interested trusts” is extremely lengthy, and long on generic waffle (“settlor interested trusts occupy a distinct position, offering flexibility and control.”) but its list of tax issues omits the key point that a settlor interested trust is usually something that tax planning tries to avoid because the trust settlor remains taxable on trust income, and it’s a gift with reservation.
This page on “how to put your house in a trust in the UK” discussed using a “revocable trust” – but that’s a US concept that has no equivalent in English law or UK tax law. Multiplepages discuss “revocable trusts”. Since we wrote to MP Estate Planning, they’ve been rewritten.
Similarly, multiple pages discuss the concept of an “attorney-in-fact”. It’s not a concept in English law.
This page about deeds of variation goes on for pages, talks about “gift tax” and repeats meaningless phrases like “several notable cases in UK law highlight the importance of Deed of Variation regulations” (there are no such regulations).
A page on “Preventing Nursing Home Takeover” said “Options for funding care and government support, like Medicaid, might be available”. Medicaid is a US programme that can cover medical costs for people on low income. It is, obviously, not available to anyone in the UK. The new page is fixed.
There are then many pages full of misinformation, many with little to do with tax or trusts. A page about dementia, for example, incorrectly describes the laws around incapacity, and includes an entirely invented quote attributed to the Alzheimer’s Society.
This page says that if a UK resident gifts assets to a spouse living abroad, they may need to report the gift to HMRC. There is no such rule.
There are over a thousand articles on various aspects of tax and trusts, and over three million words – and it’s full of errors. You can see a complete list here and here – note how the edit times are often only a minute apart (and you can also see, at the top of the second files, all the edits made after we approached MP Estate Planning in March 2026).
The obvious explanation: the website is mostly AI-generated – it’s what’s often called “AI slop“.
We expect the website was created in this way to maximise MP Estate Planning’s Google hits for people researching tax and trusts. It is, however, deeply irresponsible, because it’s providing people with false information.8
If an accounting or law firm behaved in this way then we expect there would be serious regulatory sanctions. MP Estate Planning, however, is entirely unregulated.
A mysterious business failure
MP Estate Planning is not Mike Pugh’s first Will writing venture. Before that, he incorporated a company called Maplebrook Wills Ltd in 2017. It provided similar services to MP Estate Planning, as well as selling a “franchise opportunity” to use its software, brand and templates in your own business.
Maplebrook Wills never appears to have had the success of MP Estate Planning. The business filed “micro-entity” accounts for 2019, 2020, and 2021. Its final filed accounts in 2021 showed total net assets of just £85,841. It then failed to file accounts for 2022, Pugh resigned as director (replaced by someone who appears to be his wife), and the company entered liquidation.
The liquidators’ initial 2023 statement of affairs made this look like a fairly ordinary small-company collapse: about £169,000 was owed to creditors, including about £78,000 to HMRC. But the later documents suggest there may be much more to the story.
Most strikingly, the liquidators’ 2025 report says that HMRC had now submitted a claim for £1,735,520. That is an astonishing figure for a small company. The report treats that claim as unsecured, not preferential. If so, that means it is not for VAT, or PAYE income tax or national insurance (which rank as secondary preferential debts in an insolvency). The £1.7m must, therefore, be something else – most likely corporation tax and/or very large HMRC penalties.
We don’t understand how so small a company could run up a £1.7m tax liability; to owe that much in standard corporation tax alone, a business would need to generate roughly £9 million in profit (and the accounts suggest this business’s profits were less than a tenth of that figure). Whatever the explanation, something appears to have gone badly wrong. And, at the same time, the preferential debts went up to £176,807.
The impression that something went very wrong is supported by the liquidator’s report that the director and bookkeeper have failed to cooperate with investigations into the company’s final trading period:
As previously reported, my statutory investigations into the company’s affairs remained ongoing. Creditors are aware that these investigations concern the movement of the company’s assets and liabilities since the last set of formal accounts was prepared, as well as transactions undertaken during the company’s final trading period.
Throughout the reporting period, I have continued to make extensive efforts to determine whether the transactions identified during the company’s final trading period were made in the ordinary course of business. I have also continued enquiries into the movement of assets and liabilities during the same period to ensure that such movements can be accurately accounted for.
Despite repeated requests issued to the director and the company’s bookkeeper, I have not received sufficient information to progress these enquiries.
Accordingly, following the period under review, I have formally instructed my Solicitors, Freeths LLP, to assist in obtaining the information required to advance my statutory investigations. Freeths LLP are currently reviewing the material available and will advise me on the appropriate next steps in due course.
I will provide creditors with a further update in my next report.
That is unusual language for what was supposedly a straightforward small-business failure. The liquidators are investigating transactions in the final trading period, movements in assets and liabilities after the last filed accounts, and have had to instruct solicitors because they say they have not received enough information from the director and the bookkeeper. That does not tell us what happened. But it does suggest the liquidators believe there are serious unanswered questions about the company’s affairs.
We can only speculate about the detail. One notable fact is that the Maplebrook franchise business appears to have been transferred to a new company, Maplebrook EDGE Network Ltd, incorporated before Maplebrook Wills Ltd went into insolvent liquidation. It is possible the liquidators are examining whether assets were moved out of the company for less than full value. But that is just a possibility.
This due diligence report from business intelligence firm Tech City Labs contains further information on MP Estate Planning, Maplebrook Wills, and other connected companies and individuals.9
Currently we have no explanation why a small company with roughly £90,000 of initial non-tax unsecured creditors should suddenly owe £1.7m to HMRC.
We asked Mike Pugh; he didn’t respond.
Accounts that make no sense
Here’s MP Estate Planning’s balance sheet for its first full year of trading, 2024:
The 2024 figures here bear no relation to the figures in the 2024 accounts:
Fixed Assets: The original 2024 accounts show £3,179. The 2024 comparative column in the 2025 accounts shows £209.
Current Assets: The original 2024 accounts report £410,277. The 2024 comparative in the 2025 accounts reports £267,565.
Creditors (due within one year): The original 2024 accounts list £404,280. The 2024 comparative in the 2025 accounts lists £153,548.
Total Net Assets/Equity: The original 2024 accounts state the company had £9,176 in net assets. The 2025 accounts state the 2024 net assets were £114,226.
This isn’t a rounding issue, formatting issue, or taxonomy issue. These are just fundamentally different numbers. The accounts weren’t restated, there’s no prior year adjustment, and no note explaining the reason for the changes.
We have no explanation for this.
The 2024 accounts were filed using the Companies House online service (probably by Mike Pugh or someone at MP Estate Planning). The 2025 accounts were filed using professional accountancy software by “LC Accounting”. We believe it’s this small firm in Somerset – we wrote to them asking for comment, but didn’t hear back.
The pitch and the reality
What is a trust?
MP Estate Planning, and many other unregulated firms, sell trusts as a magic box that makes your assets disappear from the taxman and your creditors. The reality is that trusts are much less mysterious, and much less able to achieve these objectives.
A trust is a legal arrangement for holding assets. The key idea is that legal ownership (whose name is on the title) can be separated from beneficial ownership (who is entitled to benefit).
Every trust has:
Trustees: the people (or a company) who hold the assets legally and make decisions. Trustees must act in the best interests of the beneficiaries and follow the trust deed. They can be personally liable if they get it wrong.
Beneficiaries: the people who can benefit from the trust (for example, by receiving income or capital, or by living in a property).
A settlor: the person who creates the trust and usually provides the assets.
A trust deed: the document setting out who the trustees and beneficiaries are, and what powers and rules apply.
Trusts are used for many legitimate reasons (for example, to manage assets for children, to provide for a vulnerable person, or to control how family wealth is distributed). But they come with real-world consequences: trustees have duties, paperwork and often ongoing administration.10
Diagram connections
Diagram connections
From Settlor to Trustees (Label: Transfers assets)
From Trustees to Trust Assets (Label: Legal Ownership)
From Trustees to Beneficiaries (Label: Beneficial Ownership)
Newspaper headlines often give the impression that trusts avoid tax. However, for most normal people, trusts are not good tax planning vehicles. Precisely because of their historic association with tax avoidance, successive Parliaments have built an extensive set of rules around them:
A gift into trust is a “chargeable lifetime transfer” – inheritance tax at 20%11 of the value of the property put into trust (after the £325k nil rate band).
The trust is then liable to an “anniversary charge” of up to 6% on its value (above £325k) every ten years.12
If you “give away” an asset but keep the benefit (for example, you keep living in your home rent-free), tax law will often treat you as still owning it, whatever labels are used in the documents.
You can be hit with a capital gains tax charge when you put assets into trust.
The trust itself is subject to capital gains tax and income tax, and its distributions to beneficiaries are also taxed.13
This is a very simplified summary of what is a very complex and frequently-changing set of rules.
The pitch
MP Estate Planning UK Ltd was founded by Mike Pugh, a Canadian who came to the UK in 2017. He claims to have a solution to “ALL THE MODERN THREATS”. Meaning: inheritance tax, care home fees, divorce and creditors:
Here’s a complete client proposal from MP Estate Planning:
There are four separate tax claims here:
You can put assets in trust but avoid the 20% entry charge and 6% anniversary charge.
You can give assets to your children but still live in your house, and avoid the “gift with reservation of benefit” (GROB) rules.
Another loophole lets you give your house to your children, and still live in it, thanks to a 1999 case.
And you can give your rental properties to your children, but get them to “gift” the rent back to you, so you still live off the income.
Our starting point is that lifetime trusts are poor tax planning for most people. They often result in more inheritance tax because the spouse exemption and residence nil rate bands aren’t available to trusts.
The MP Estate Planning structures we reviewed are, however, worse than that: they have no tax benefit and likely trigger a series of unnecessary tax bills.
In this video, Mike Pugh describes advising an elderly widow to put a £650,000 property in trust. That’s terrible advice – as he says, there is no inheritance tax benefit – but what he doesn’t say is that there will be up-front inheritance tax on the creation of the trust of £65,000.14 Putting the property in trust also results in the permanent loss of the residence nil rate band, which would have been worth up to £110,000 for her.15 And any future capital gain will be taxed in the trust – it wouldn’t have been if she’d retained ownership. This is a tax disaster – for which Pugh says he charged her £5,340.
One experienced adviser told us that the tax claims made by MP Estate Planning were so egregiously bad that they looked like fraud.16
The following sections look at each of these claims. We put our criticisms to MP Estate Planning and they told us they’d respond – they didn’t.
1. “Presto magic” to avoid the 6% anniversary charge
The inheritance tax changes in the 2024 Budget created a huge demand for inheritance tax planning. That’s caused an influx of unregulated firms offering inheritance tax solutions that are “too good to be true”.
MP Estate Planning’s pitch of “every home in a trust” has the immediate problem of the 20% entry charge and 6% anniversary charge every ten years, each on value over £325,000.
But Mike Pugh has a solution: trustees can simply shift the excess over £325k out of the trust and, “presto magic” there’s no tax to pay:
We’ve seen how they implement this:
This does not work:
An obvious point: all the claimed advantages of the trust: inheritance tax avoidance, protection against divorce and care home fees, are now limited to the first £325k of value. That’s pretty pointless, given that the first £325k of value is exempt from inheritance tax anyway.17 We expect most of MP Estate Planning’s clients have houses that are either worth more than that, or will likely be worth more than that in the foreseeable future.
It’s unclear how this is supposed to work as a practical matter; it’s even possible the trust is void for lack of certainty.18
The fact the settlor can receive back value from the trust means that it’s classified as a “settlor interested trust”, and so there’s an up-front capital gains tax charge on the disposal of the property to the trust (unless main residence relief applies). Hold-over relief is unavailable.19 Any income from the trust (for example rental income) is taxable in the hands of the parent/settlor.
When and if the value of the trust property exceeds £325k then the way the trust is drafted means there is a reallocation from Fund A to Fund B, and a transfer of beneficial ownership to the parent/settlor. That’s probably a capital gains tax disposal at market value. So any rise in value over £325k, even just as property prices rise over time, may trigger a 24% CGT charge (although how this would work in practice is not clear).20
One of the main purposes of the trust is to avoid the 6% anniversary inheritance tax charge. This is achieved by the Fund A and Fund B mechanism, which we regard as contrived and abnormal. MP Estate Planning promote this structure. It follows that MP Estate Planning had an obligation under the Disclosure Of Tax Avoidance Schemes rules to disclose the structure to HMRC. We understand that they did not.
This trust could well mean that the parents lose the main residence capital gains tax exemption (because they no longer own the house). That’s a serious tax downside which MP Estate Planning never mentions.
We discussed this structure with a leading tax KC – he said he thought the trust was “a poorly drafted mess and would cause more problems than it solved”.
You are perfectly entitled to do this if you are really making a gift. But if the gift is just on paper, and you continue to benefit from the property, then your “gift” is ignored for inheritance tax purpose thanks to the “gift with reservation of benefit” rules. The classic example is: I give my house to my children, but I continue to live in it. It’s a “gift with reservation of benefit” and disregarded.
MP Estate Planning say there’s an easy solution:
Mike Pugh is referring to the rule in section 102B(4)(a) Finance Act 1986 – it was introduced specifically for the situation where an adult child lives with a parent to look after them:
The key elements are that there is a gift of an undivided interest in land (e.g. “parent gives half the property to the child”), the donor and donee occupy the land and the donor doesn’t receive a benefit from the gift.
The first thing MP Estate Planning get wrong is that they don’t know what an undivided interest in land is. Here’s their attempt to create one:
One person cannot hold as “tenants in common”. It’s a hopeless failure to get within section 102B.
Even when they get that right, MP Estate Planning have a bizarre idea of what the word “occupy” means:
In other words, they think that a child will “occupy” the land for this purpose if they visit their parents occasionally, keep belongings in the house (such as a school uniform), and have access to the property and a key. That is contrary to the normal human meaning of “occupy”. Some advisers interpret the section as permitting children to live elsewhere primarily, provided they visit most weekends and holidays.212223 However MP Estate Planning’s view that you “occupy” a property if you visit it a few times a year goes far beyond anything our team has seen.
We therefore view this planning as well outside mainstream tax planning; we believe HMRC would challenge it if they became aware of it, and we don’t think the taxpayer would have any material prospect of success.24
MP Estate Planning suggest the planning is more effective if the child receives the gift and then lives with the parents. That is obviously correct – indeed the planning works if the child lives with the parents (and in our view that would continue to be the case if, for example, the children were at university but retained a bedroom at their parents’ house, and stayed there for some weekends and most holidays). However the problem is that children tend to leave, and at that point the reservation of benefit rules will apply.
We believe one of two things are happening. Either MP Estate Planning has misread “occupy” in s102B(4)(a) as “able or entitled to occupy” (the test in a preceding section), and don’t realise that section 102B(4)(a) requires actual occupation. Or this is an attempt to fool HMRC with a school uniform.
One experienced adviser described it to us as “utter nonsense”. Another, a tax KC with trusts tax expertise, said “it doesn’t look like they’ve read the legislation”.
There is a further even more obvious problem. We’ve seen a case where MP Estate Planning advised that the “occupy” strategy worked to prevent a gift with reservation of benefit where property was put in trust. It cannot. Section 102B(4)(a) requires that the “donee” occupy the property. When property is declared on trust then the “donee” is the trust, and a trust can’t occupy anything. This point is usually wellunderstood by advisers.25
3. Using a 1999 licence loophole that doesn’t exist
MP Estate Planning claim to have found another loophole, and one which has existed since 1999:
Mike Pugh is very vague here, but we’ve seen documents where Estate Planning claim that you can put your home into a trust, exclude yourself as a beneficiary, but still carry on living there under a “trustee licence”. They say this means there is no “gift with reservation of benefit”.
We saw an email to a prospective client in which an MP Estate Planning employee said:
“The design allows the settlor to retain occupation under a trustee licence, not a beneficial right — ensuring no ‘gift with reservation’…
No rent or benefit is reserved.”
This is a hopeless argument. The gift with reservation rules look at whether you have given away the property whilst still “enjoying” it. The legal form used – lease, licence, or anything else – is entirely irrelevant.
There is a straightforward, well‑known way to make a gift of a home effective while you keep living there: you pay the new owner a full market rent for the rest of your life. The legislation expressly allows for this.26 MP Estate Planning’s pitch is the opposite: they say there is a “trustee licence” and “no rent”. If that is what happens in real life, it is hard to see how the arrangement can be anything other than a reservation of benefit.
Quite aside from not working, the structure has the significant downside of losing the parents’ main residence capital gains tax exemption.
There may again be an obligation for MP Estate Planning to disclose the scheme to HMRC under DOTAS; we understand that they have not done so.
A tax KC we spoke to described MP Estate Planning’s approach as “baffling”, saying “I have no idea what they think this can achieve”.
4. Gifts that ignore an anti-avoidance rule
In principle it’s easy to avoid inheritance tax: just give your assets to your children. But there’s an obvious problem: most retired people who have assets live off the proceeds of the assets.
MP Estate Planning say you can have your cake and eat it: put rental properties into a trust, but still receive the rent from the properties:
The idea is simple: the trust mandates the rental income to the beneficiaries (the children) and they pay tax on it, and then give the money back to their parents.
And MP Estate Planning say that, as long as there’s no written agreement, it’s fine:
“If there is any hint that there is a written arrangement in place, the planning will potentially fall foul of the associated operations provisions (IHTA 1984 s268).”
This is very wrong.
The “associated operations” rules allow HMRC to treat a series of connected transactions and steps as a single arrangement when determining whether a transfer of value (like the gift of rental properties) has taken place.
Here’s the definition:
There is no requirement in the legislation, caselaw or HMRCguidance that the “operations” in question are in writing (and HMRC give an example in their guidance where successive gifts are subject to the rules).
In HMRC v Parry, the Supreme Court held that, applying Macpherson, the associated operations rules may apply if steps form part of and contribute to a scheme intended to confer a gratuitous benefit. Whether such a scheme exists is a question of fact, and may be established by evidence showing how the steps were intended to operate together; it does not require a formal written arrangement.
In this case there is clearly a scheme: the gift of the properties and the return of the income are clearly intended to operate together. This, after all, is what MP Estate Planning are selling. We therefore think it’s reasonably clear the “associated operations” rules will apply, so that for inheritance tax purposes the gift and the return of income would be analysed together as a single scheme.
The effect is that the arrangement must be analysed as a single scheme, so that (for inheritance tax purposes) the parents continue to benefit from the rental income. The ‘gift with reservation of benefit’ rules will, therefore, immediately bite. The consequence is that the full capital value of the properties will be treated as still belonging to the parents’ estate when they die, and heavily taxed. The structure therefore fails in a rather messy, entirely pointless, and highly expensive manner.28
High risk landlord tax planning
MP Estate Planning seems to be trying to move into general tax planning for landlords, and are adopting some planning that we would characterise as extremely high risk.
A slide from an MP Estate Planning podcast is suggesting that a landlord holding properties directly could form a partnership for a year, then incorporate the partnership, and have no capital gains tax or stamp duty:
The idea appears to be that the landlord first transfers their properties into a newly-created partnership – so, for example, if they own property with their spouse, the married couple are the partners in the partnership. They run that partnership briefly, and then transfer the partnership business to a company. The promoters claim that this avoids capital gains tax, stamp duty land tax and inheritance tax.
This planning is extremely high risk.
In principle a partnership can in some circumstances incorporate its real estate business without stamp duty land tax – but if there is a scheme of transactions to establish the partnership and then incorporate then the section 75A anti-avoidance rule means that SDLT will likely apply. If someone is obtaining the advice in this slide from MP Estates then it will be reasonably clear there was a prior arrangement. Waiting one year, or five years, makes no difference.2930
The capital gains tax planning could in principle succeed – there is potentially incorporation relief on the transfer of a business to a company. However it is a technical and difficult relief which normally requires the landlord to be carrying on a genuine property business, not merely holding investment properties, and can be hard to apply where the property is mortgaged. HMRC are scrutinising incorporation relief claims at the moment, and the law is about to change to require incorporation relief claims to be filed with HMRC.
We would suggest landlords carefully consider whether the tax and other benefits of incorporating justify the risk of high capital gains tax and stamp duty land tax charges. A competent tax adviser will always explain the level of risk and the worst case downside. When an adviser doesn’t do this, in our view it raises a large red flag.
Saving probate costs
Elderly people are often worried about the future costs of probate. Mike Pugh says they should be, and his trusts can solve the problem:
“By putting your largest asset into a trust, you can help to reduce future probate costs, as probate’s often geared on the size and complexity of the estate.
If your house doesn’t form part of the estate, it doesn’t form part of the price analysis.”
In our view the opposite is the case: the complexity caused by MP Estate Planning’s trusts will greatly add to the cost of probate. That would be the case even if the trusts were correctly structured and drafted – but they are not. We are aware of one case where the heirs of an MP Estate Planning client had to engage a KC at great cost to resolve the difficulties MP Estate Planning had caused.
The Society of Will Writers tells its members not to make this claim:
Divorce protection
MP Estate Planning heavily markets their trusts as a way that can financially support your children after you die, but if your children divorce then their spouse will have no claim on their assets:
“The divorce rate in the UK is 42%. What if your child gets a divorce? Your child’s future Mr. or Mrs. Wrong could walk out with half your life savings if your assets are not in a trust. Don’t leave money to children. Leave it to a trust. A trust will never get a divorce. A trust is the only thing we have that will make money stick to blood”.
We spoke to barristers and solicitors specialising in chancery law, family law, and nuptial agreements, and they all expected the trust would fail to achieve this.
Divorcing spouses have been successful in arguing that an ex-spouse’s ability to benefit from a trust is a matrimonial asset (even where it’s a discretionary trust) and should be part of the divorce settlement. Courts can and do make orders reallocating trust assets.
The decided cases have involved trusts where the trustees were genuinely independent, and beneficiaries could therefore argue that they weren’t necessarily going to have access to the trust assets. In the MP Estate Planning trusts we reviewed, the beneficiaries are also the trustees – the trusts are therefore highly vulnerable to attack in divorce proceedings. They’re simply part of the “property and other financial resources“31 of the child, and part of the “matrimonial pot” in the same way as any other asset. The arrangement achieves nothing.32
The courts often don’t need to award trust assets to a spouse – they can simply adjust the allocation of other assets to reflect the expected value of a trust interest (although this “judicial encouragement” doctrine has limits).
The Society of Will Writers tells its members not to make this claim:
Bankruptcy protection
Mike Pugh warns elderly clients that if they’re sued, they could become homeless:
He promises that trusts will protect your estate from insolvency (as well as divorce and care home fees; more on that below):
“ So what happens if you do not set up a trust?
Well, if you own anything, it can be taken from you.
If you don’t own it, it can’t be taken from you. And that’s what a trust does.
A trust removes you as the sole legal owner of an item. Therefore, you can’t lose it in a future divorce or to care fees or to taxes or litigation or bankruptcy.”
Similarly, their October 2025 proposal lists “Protection against future Bankruptcy” as one of the primary benefits of the “MP Estate Protection Plan”.
This is all variant of the “deed in the drawer” structure that’s been used for centuries. As one judge summarised it:
“The phenomenon of the “deed in the drawer” is one that is now frequently encountered. X appears to be the owner of a property, and people lend to him or otherwise deal with him on the footing that he owns it. But if X becomes bankrupt or the subject of enforcement proceedings a deed is produced which shows that in truth he holds the property upon trust for somebody else. In some cases these deeds are simply not authentic. In other cases they are authentic, but simply not noted in any public register.”
This is misleading. First, for almost all the elderly people MP Estate Planning are targeting, bankruptcy is not something they realistically should be worrying about (the bankruptcy of their children is a more reasonable concern; but that’s not the claim made in the above video).
Presenting bankruptcy as a “modern threat” is scaremongering. But if someone does go bankrupt, it is absolutely not the case that they “can’t lose” property if it’s in a trust:
Gifts into a trust will be set aside if made within two years of your bankruptcy, or five years if you were insolvent at the time.
A gift made at any time can be set aside if a court is satisfied that the gift was made for (amongst other things) the purpose33 of putting assets beyond the reach of a person who is making, or may at some time make, a claim against him. 34
Given the explicit marketing claims made by MP Estate Planning, it would be difficult to argue that protecting assets from creditors was not a primary purpose of setting up the trust.
The Society of Will Writers tells its members not to make this claim:
Care home costs
The rising cost of social care is a significant financial challenge for local authorities, and now accounts for 40% of all local authority spending. To try to control this, almost all local authorities only cover the cost of social care for people with assets of less than £23,250. It has been politically challenging to find a better solution. In the meantime, firms like MP Estate Planning market trusts as a solution to avoid having to pay for social care. The idea is to reduce your assets to below £23,250, or at least make sure your house never forms part of those assets.
There are rules in the Care Act which disregard any steps people take to avoid these rules by depriving themselves of assets. MP Estate Planning appears to have not read these rules.
In this video, Mike Pugh says people who’ve been diagnosed with a serious illness should put their property into trust, and that will stop local authorities assessing them to make a contribution if they later require long term care.
He for some reason starts talking about the Insolvency Act (which is irrelevant):
“So let’s remember that the CARE Act states that only if there’s a foreseeable need for care would you be crossing any lines…
…
Let’s clear up the misunderstandings around deliberate deprivation.
The deliberate deprivation stems from the Insolvency Act. It is criminal to try to hide assets from creditors. That’s a criminal offense.35 And so if you’re going to go bankrupt under the Insolvency Act, you’re not allowed to place assets into a trust.
Here, what we’re talking about, however, is a potential future care element. That means there are no creditors today. You don’t owe any money for care, you’re not in care, and there’s no foreseeable need for care. So that means you are welcome to place your property in the trust now.
This is just making the point that foreseeability is relevant when determining what the “purpose” of a transaction was. We don’t believe the guidance anticipates a trust structure being sold specifically to avoid paying care charges. The courts in practice determine “purpose” from surrounding circumstances.36 In the view of Care Act specialists we spoke to, it would be reasonable for a local authority to decide that someone who’d bought the MP Estate Planning structure37 had “deprived themselves for the purpose of decreasing the amount that they may be liable to pay towards the cost of meeting their needs for care and support”.38 Local authorities could obtain disclosure of MP Estate Planning’s advice in order to establish this. 39
They’d be aided in this by the statutory guidance, which gives putting assets into trust as a specific example of “deprivation of assets”:
Some local authorities have expressly identified “lifetime trusts” (like those created by MP Estate Planning) as examples of asset deprivation. 40 It’s notable that the people selling these trusts are almost always unqualified and unregulated, whilst actual qualified solicitorswarn against them.
It is therefore quite wrong for MP Estate Planning to confidently suggest it’s all about “foreseeability”, and ignore both the wording of the statute and the references to trusts in guidance:
In other videos, Pugh claims that putting property into trust is effective to avoid care fees if the trust is created more than two years in advance. There is no legal basis for this.
This is a particularly egregious error because the video above flashes onto the screen a clip from guidance from Age UK, which makes clear that it’s fundamentally the intention behind a disposal which is relevant:
The Society of Will Writers tells its members not to make this claim:
The trust defaults the mortgage
MP Estate Planning claim that you can put a property into trust without telling your mortgage lender. This is false. Most standard residential mortgages contain strict covenants prohibiting the borrower from transferring interests in the property (including beneficial ownership) without the lender’s express written consent.
“Transferring ownership of a property into a trust without informing your lender and seeking their consent would most likely be a breach of a mortgage’s terms and conditions.”
“The property can be taken out of the trust, mortgaged, and then put back into the trust”
This is very poor advice.
Taking the property out of trust doesn’t fix the fundamental problem that most mortgage terms prohibit transferring ownership of the property.
But it’s worse than that. There are now potentially two capital gains tax events (the trust disposing of the property to the parents, and the parents disposing of it back into the trust). If the value of the trust is over £325,000 then pulling the house out triggers an IHT exit charge. Then, when they put the house back into the trust after getting the mortgage, it triggers a new 20% IHT entry charge (on the value over £325,000). Their “simple” workaround could easily cost the client hundreds of thousands of pounds in tax every time they want to fix their mortgage rate.
Here’s a nonsensical explanation we saw from MP Estate Planning:
The “equitable value” is not a legal concept. The mortgage amount and the market value are almost always different. The lender is not the “legal owner” of the property. A real estate law specialist we spoke to concluded that whoever wrote this has no understanding of mortgages.
Incompetent advice
We have seen a series of badly drafted documents and incompetent responses from MP Estate Planning personnel:
We saw one trust where a mother was declaring a trust with her daughter as a trustee and discretionary beneficiary. The trust document listed the daughter as the settlor. When challenged on this, the adviser at MP Estate Planning didn’t appear to understand the difference between a settlor and a trustee.
An MP Estate Planning adviser did not understand that the fact value could pass back to the settlor made it a settlor-interested trust. He responded that “Any tax related matter should be dealt with by an accountant”: but no accountant was involved when they established the trust.
We also saw one trust deed with one of the worst drafting errors we’ve seen:
Under the “Exclusion of Settlor and Spouse” there should be a clause preventing the settlor and their spouse ever benefiting from the trust. This is necessary to prevent the settlor interested trust rules applying, causing (amongst other effects) an up-front capital gains charge. But instead someone accidentally duplicated the text of the next clause (“Applicable Law”) into “Exclusion of Settlor and Spouse”. That’s a serious error, because it means the trust likely will be a settlor interested trust.41
And, as noted above, we saw another deed where MP Estate Planning tried to create ownership as tenants in common, and failed (because they didn’t realise that requires two or more people):
It’s believed by our team that this kind of error is most likely caused by people with no legal qualifications drafting complex legal documents. Drafting trusts over land is a “reserved activity” that can only be conducted by solicitors and certain other qualified professionals – if unqualified staff are indeed drafting these documents then that’s a criminal offence.
The scale of the problem
A recent recruitment video claims that, in the first six months of 2025/26, MP Estate Planning made £1.66m in fees, with huge growth year-on-year. That implies they’ll bill at least £3m in fees this year.
However, most of their clients are buying multiple products, and so these prices quickly add up – we understand overall fees in the tens of thousands are common (and indeed that would be necessary for a team of this size to make £3m in revenue). Mike Pugh says:
“I do know that my competitors that offer the sophisticated high end stuff, they tend and – I’m talking Magic Circle and inside the M25 – they tend to charge either two percent of asset value or 10 percent of tax savings.
If you’re saving five million pounds, they could charge up to half a million… and I’m nowhere near the M25 – I’m in Bristol and we do not charge big city prices.
So we’re in the tens of not the hundreds of thousands.”
The claim that firms charge 2% of asset value or 10% of tax savings is, in the experience of our team, not correct. Legal/tax fees of £500,000 would be for very large estates, not people worth “mere” millions.
The response from MP Estate Planning and Mike Pugh
We asked MP Estate Planning to respond to the most significant points in this report:
Here’s our original email asking for comment:
And then, after MP Estate Planning acknowledged receipt:
Here’s their response. It reads like a press release, and doesn’t answer a single substantive point (other than the unconvincing “editing” explanation for their May 2023 video, as noted above).
This is our response to that letter:
We received a further reply – this time with responses to the “non-existent head of legal” and “use of US terminology” points that we regard as deliberately misleading:
We gave then Mike Pugh a final chance to respond substantively:
Pugh told us we’d receive a response to our technical questions: we never did. Nor did we receive an explanation as to why his previous small business went bust owing HMRC £1.7m.
Many thanks to B, S1, K and I for telling us about their experiences with MP Estate Planning (UK) Ltd.
This was a particularly complex investigation which we couldn’t have undertaken without a large team of lawyers and tax specialists, all acting pro bono. This article was written thanks to:
Inheritance tax: SH for her invaluable initial analysis, then further work from P and M and additional review from J2 and SH (again).
Other direct tax: D and Rowan Morrow-McDade (who found the 2023 video with the nonsensical claims about main residence relief)
Stamp duty land tax: J1 and Rowan, again.
Real retate finance: P
Care Act: V and Y.
Family law: T – and thanks also to N for picking up an error post-publication.
Insolvency law: A and I with additional review from C.
Corporate structure and business history: M.
Additional research and data: business intelligence provider Tech City Labs.
Plus numerous other practitioners who read through late drafts.
We usually can’t name our contributors, partly because it could be professionally awkward for their current employer, and partly because of concerns about retaliatory legal action.
For MP Estate Planning personnel to actually commit fraud would require them to know that they were making false claims and to be acting dishonestly; we don’t know if either is the case. It is plausible they are just reckless. ↩︎
We are reasonably sure it is the same individual. The Daniel James Irwin who was a director of Safe Hands had a date of birth May 1990. Daniel James Irwin, date of birth June 1990, is also a director of a previous Maplebrook trust entity. He has twoLinkedIn accounts, neither of which are updated, and neither of which show his time at Safe Hands. ↩︎
It is reasonably clear that an untrue representation was made by Mr Pugh with the intention of making a gain, and that he knew it was untrue. The crucial legal question to determine whether an offence was committed is whether Mr Pugh was “dishonest”. Under English law, this means asking whether his conduct was dishonest by the standards of ordinary decent people (regardless of whether the individuals themselves believed at the time that they were being dishonest). The subjective element of the test for dishonesty (see Ghosh (1982)) was removed by Ivey [2017] for civil cases, and that decision was confirmed to apply to criminal cases in Barton [2020]. The fact that a defendant might plead he or she was acting in line with what others were doing, and therefore did not believe it to be dishonest, is no longer relevant if the jury finds they knew what they were doing and it was objectively dishonest. The leading textbook of criminal law and practice, Archbold, states: “In most cases the jury will need no further direction than the short two-limb test in Barton “(a) what was the defendant’s actual state of knowledge or belief as to the facts and (b) was his conduct dishonest by the standards of ordinary decent people?”. ↩︎
We don’t think any real person would write “Best will writing service and lasting power of attorney in Bristol, UK” or “MP Estate Planning offers great services and customer care when it comes to estate planning, lasting power of attorney and will planning in Bristol”. ↩︎
We refer to English law because our usual team does not have expertise in Scottish law or the law of Northern Ireland; but we are reasonably confident that Pugh’s comments are equally inapplicable to Scottish and Northern Irish law. ↩︎
There would be stamp duty if the children took over the mortgage – but MP Estate Planning appears to leave the mortgage where it is. ↩︎
Tech City Labs kindly provided us with the report pro bono and has authorised us to publish it here. ↩︎
The trusts discussed here are discretionary trusts and settlements – the kinds of trust MP Estate Planning sells. The most common kind of trust is a “bare trust” or nominee arrangement – those arise all the time by operation of law in many ordinary personal and business contexts, and don’t normally have tax consequences. ↩︎
The lifetime rate of IHT is 20% but in practice, and especially where the trustees only hold assets not cash, the effective rate is normally “grossed up” to 25% as it’s the donor rather than the trustees that pay the tax. ↩︎
Plus an exit charge on any part-ten year period when/if the trust comes to an end. ↩︎
With complex rules that often, but not always, avoid double taxation. ↩︎
20% of £650,000 minus the £325,000 nil rate band. ↩︎
The RNB is £175,000 for her plus £100,000 from her late husband, who died in 1984. ↩︎
As we say in the introduction, for MP Estate Planning personnel to actually commit fraud would require them to know that they were making false claims and to be acting dishonestly; we don’t know if either is the case. ↩︎
After seven years another £325k nil rate band becomes available, but for the first seven years this structure is all downside. ↩︎
When is the valuation tested? Is it tested daily? Annually? Upon a specific triggering event? The deed is entirely silent. How is a valuation determined? Again – nothing. And how does “Fund B” Work? It’s not clear it can be a “bare trust” because under Saunders v Vautier, the beneficiary (the Settlor) would be entitled to call for the trust property – but here that can’t happen because the trustees are holding for both the bare trust and the discretionary trust. However the intention is clear enough that the trust lawyers we spoke to thought that the trust would likely be given effect, notwithstanding the very unclear mechanics. ↩︎
Ordinarily, transferring assets into a relevant property trust allows for capital gains tax to be held over under section 260 of the Taxation of Chargeable Gains Act 1992. However, section 169F specifically denies this relief for settlor-interested trusts. ↩︎
A gift to a trust is not usually subject to stamp duty land tax, because there is no consideration. However this is not a gift – the parent/settlor is getting something back – the right to receive all value over £325k. We’ve considered whether that gives rise to an SDLT charge, either on day one or subsequently – our conclusion is that it probably doesn’t (but it’s a complex question and we haven’t undertaken a full analysis). ↩︎
Patrick Soares says he believes the section applies if a child “treats [the property] has his home, is physically present there most weekends and for some holidays, has an earmarked bedroom and study, keeps some of his possessions there and has the keys to come and go as he pleases, and he is not just a guest or temporary visitor”. Emma Chamberlain takes a slightly more cautious view, saying that there must be substantive occupation even if not as a main home. These seem defensible readings to us – “occupy” clearly means actual physical presence but it doesn’t necessarily mean full time occupation. There is some risk in the Soares/Chamberlain approach, and we can’t exclude HMRC challenging such an arrangement on the basis that, for two people to “occupy” a property, their presence must be of similar (but not identical) intensity (which seems to have been the intention of the Government that enacted the rule). Other advisers take a more cautious view. ↩︎
There is no caselaw on this point. There are, however, non-tax authorities on the meaning of “occupy”; they illustrate the (obvious) point that it requires an actual presence, not just the potential for a presence. In this case we feel the purpose of the taxing statute (as elucidated by the Dawn Primarolo statement) puts the point beyond reasonable doubt. ↩︎
The Soares and Chamberlain articles have been widely read, and their approach has been adapted by some firms into a much less rigorous approach that we suspect Soares and Chamberlain would disagree with. For example, Countrywide says “The test is likely to be satisfied where, for instance, there is a gift of a share of the main residence to a child who visits the property on a regular basis, is able to come and go as they please, have their own key and leaves their possessions at the property. There does of course need to be more than mere storage of items at the property and so an occupier having their own bedroom and being able to come and go as they please would certainly make the test easier to satisfy”. This may be over-reading HMRC guidance on occupation in the context of the pre-owned assets rules – HMRC has an obvious incentive to give the term a wide meaning here, but HMRC guidance is not legislation and in practice cannot be relied upon by taxpayers. ↩︎
There are other more sophisticated structures involving s102B, and it has been suggested the GAAR could apply to them (see page 20 of this expanded version of the Patrick Soares article), but we don’t think the GAAR would be necessary to the MP Estate Planning structure. ↩︎
Even if MP Estate Planning’s “loopholes” did work to avoid the gift with reservation rules (they don’t), there is a separate anti-avoidance regime that can still impose an ongoing tax charge: the pre-owned assets tax (POAT). POAT was introduced to counter arrangements where someone successfully removes an asset (typically a home) from their estate for inheritance tax purposes, but continues to enjoy it. It is a standalone income tax charge on the benefit of continued occupation/use of an asset you previously owned or funded. The rules are complex but, given MP Estate Planning’s trusts fail to avoid the gift with reservation rules, we won’t go into them further. ↩︎
Sch 20 para 6(1)(a) says the donor’s continued “actual occupation of the land … shall be disregarded if it is for full consideration in money or money’s worth”. This is the statutory basis for the “pay market rent” approach. ↩︎
Ingram involved a “lease carve‑out” scheme: the homeowner created and kept a proprietary lease (so they had a real property right to stay), and only then gave away the freehold. Later legislation severely restricted that approach. Subsequent attempts to find similar work-arounds have failed. ↩︎
We think it probably isn’t disclosable under DOTAS because it is in sense “too simple”: there’s nothing contrived about it. It is however possible that the “premium fee” hallmark applies as a factual matter. ↩︎
Although less than three years may trigger a charge under the unrelated provision in paragraph 17A Schedule 15 Finance Act 2003. ↩︎
There seems to be a common view amongst some unregulated advisers that it’s safe to form a partnership, wait three years, and then incorporate. There is no such limitation on section 75A in the legislation or any HMRC guidance – the sole question is whether partnership and incorporation are, together, “scheme transactions”. Where a partnership is established as a step towards incorporation, then in our view there probably would be “scheme transactions”. That is particularly the case when there is no rationale other than tax to establish the partnership (and it’s hard to see what other rationale there could be). ↩︎
The courts have found trusts to be “other financial resources” in numerous cases of “real” trusts where the settlor influences the trustees, but does not have complete control. The test in Charman v. Charman [2006] 1 WLR 1053 is “whether, if the husband were to request [the trustee]to advance the whole (or part) of the capital of the trust to him, the trustee would be likely to do so”. ↩︎
Note we previously referred to section 37 of the Matrimonial Causes Act – that’s not relevant here where a parent is the settlor. Many thanks to N for pointing this out, and our apologies for getting this wrong. ↩︎
The Lemos judgment provides a useful example of how the courts apply section 423 in practice. ↩︎
In addition to incorrectly citing the Insolvency Act, Pugh also incorrectly claims this is a “criminal offense”. In the UK, transferring assets to put them beyond the reach of creditors is typically a civil matter leading to the transaction being set aside under section 423 of the Insolvency Act 1986. While there are some specific bankruptcy offences if a person is already bankrupt, merely putting assets into a trust to avoid future creditors is legally ineffective, but not generally a criminal offence in itself. ↩︎
See also the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman’s approach to deprivation of capital cases. ↩︎
As is often the case with tax planning, this means that MP Estate Planning’s own marketing undermines the effectiveness of their product. Someone who obtains advice from MP Estate Planning and then creates a trust could well be in a worse position than someone who creates a trust themselves, or using some other adviser who doesn’t use care home fees as a selling point. ↩︎
Another way of putting the point is to distinguish two ways in which someone’s care needs might be foreseen. First, one may have a case where someone is medically unwell or infirm and for that reason it is foreseeable they may have care needs. Second, one may have a case where someone has been told “put your assets in a trust so that if you have care needs the local authority can’t touch them”; such a person has in fact foreseen that they might have care needs, even in the absence of any medical- or health-related reason to think that they will. ↩︎
A further point is that section 70 of the Care Act 2014 gives the authority the power to go after the recipient of the assets personally to make up the difference. We’re not aware of section 70 having been used against a trustee, but it seems to us in principle that it could be. ↩︎
For the reasons set out in our technical analysis above, the trust likely falls to be a settlor interested trust anyway, but the drafting means the planning would fail regardless. ↩︎
In February 2025, we published a report about a firm called Arka Wealth.1 They’d published hundreds of TikTok videos promoting a scheme that claimed to eliminate all corporate tax, income tax, capital gains tax and inheritance tax – not just in the UK but across Europe. An unbelievable claim, and all the tax advisers I spoke to – in the UK and across Europe – said the scheme was technically without merit. Many thought it could amount to fraud. But the really surprising part was that the firm was backed by a tax barrister, Setu Kamal, who said in a YouTube video he provided an opinion to all of Arka Wealth’s clients.
Kamal declined to comment on our article, either before publication or immediately afterwards. Months later, he threatened defamation proceedings unless we removed the article, although he was never very specific about what, precisely, his complaint was. He then sent me an email demanding that I pay him 80% of the amount his clients claimed he’d lost in fees, and that I publicly state my “sincere belief” that he is “the leading barrister in the field of taxation in the country”:
There was then a strange episode in August when Kamal tried to obtain an interim injunction against me and Tax Policy Associates but, in a serious breach of court procedure, failed to give us notice of his injunction application. Fortunately the Court rejected the application out of hand. I wrote about that here.
Soon after that, Kamal commenced an £8m defamation claim – again against me and Tax Policy Associates.
We had two responses. The first was traditional: we applied to the court to strike out the parts of the claim that were technically hopeless, and sought summary judgment on the rest. The second was novel: we were the first defendants to rely on the new anti-SLAPP rules in the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023. I wrote about that here, including Kamal’s court papers and our strike-out application.
The Court issued its judgment today. We won on all grounds. Part of the claim was struck out, and we obtained summary judgment on the rest. The court also held that the case was a SLAPP – had any part of the claim survived the earlier rulings, it would have been struck out on that basis alone.
First, this demonstrates the two big truths about English libel law.
Substantive libel law is fairly sensible, and a journalist who writes something that is true and/or opinion should expect to prevail in court.2
The procedural aspects of a libel claim chill free speech.
Kamal’s claim was hopeless, elements of it were downright abusive (and intentionally so), and his conduct of the claim was incompetent. In other circumstances it would be met with ridicule – but the sum he claimed was so large that I had to take it seriously. It took six months, costs of about £146k, and an 85-page judgment, for me to have the claim dismissed.
For someone without my legal training or financial resources, it would be irrational to have fought Kamal. The rational thing to do would have been to give in, and delete the report. That’s why most libel threats succeed, and we never hear about them: a lawyer’s letter is sent, and the blogger or journalist quietly backs off. That’s a catastrophe for freedom of speech.
But it’s worse than that – it would have been irrational for a national newspaper to carry the story, because it was too niche to justify the editorial time and cost that a libel lawsuit carries. I have nothing but respect for the newspapersthatdofight huge libel claims – but they have to pick their fights, and that means small but important stories get missed.
This is the chilling effect of libel law. No other area of litigation has libel law’s potential to damage public life. Libel law enabled Jimmy Savile, Robert Maxwell, Cyril Smith, and many other monsters (note that I’m too cowardly to mention the still-living examples). Rules that are rational in commercial litigation become actively dangerous when they can be weaponised to silence critics of wrongdoing. And so it’s right that we should treat libel law, and other laws3 that SLAPPers are abusing, differently from other litigation.
That means dramatically changing the cost equation for defendants. The SLAPP strike-out goes a little in that direction, but even in my case – just about the most favourable imaginable – the cost equation was still brutal. More radical reform is required:
Make it much harder to bring claims. Right now, you can bring a libel claim without any evidence that a journalist said something false. The journalist has to prove truth (or opinion, or another defence). We should put the onus on claimants: require claimants to prove falsity, and that the publication wasn’t an opinion and wasn’t in the public interest.
Go further: introduce an American-style requirement to prove malice when the claimant is a public figure.
Give defendants assurance that, if they win, their costs will be covered. Make indemnity costs the default position.
Introduce sanctions against claimants who knowingly or recklessly make untrue statements in the course of pursuing a libel claim (whether they ultimately win or lose the claim).
Or go even further: take defamation out of the court and into informal “alternative dispute resolution” – faster, cheaper, and with no prize for the winner except a declaration that the article was false.
The Tax Bar enables abusive tax schemes
We published a report recently concluding that a small number of barristers were enabling abusive tax avoidance schemes which very possibly could be viewed as fraud, because nobody involved could seriously think the schemes had any prospect of success, and all the companies involved were liquidated as soon as HMRC started investigating.
We now have further evidence of this.
Kamal was claiming £8m in damages because he said he’d had a contract that was worth £8m, which he’d lost as a result of our article. My lawyers, Matt and Charlotte, realised something I’d missed – we were now entitled to ask for a copy of the contract. We received it just a few days before trial.
As the contract was referred to in court, I can now publish it in full:
The document has several extraordinary features:
Kamal had designed a tax avoidance scheme which supposedly enabled a company, Umbrella Link Limited4, to hire individuals (and on-supply them to recruitment companies) but avoid accounting for income tax/PAYE on their wages.
It’s stated that Kamal’s analysis confirms the scheme won’t have to be disclosed to HMRC. The document is also very careful to ensure it remains confidential. That strongly suggests that in fact it had to be disclosed to HMRC. Prima facie, this was an improper arrangement.5
Umbrella Link targeted contractors, often on modest earnings – particularly social workers. We expect most had no idea they were participating in a tax avoidance scheme. These schemes are fundamentally unethical.
The company paid Kamal £50,000 up-front for the scheme, plus 0.6% of the turnover of the company, and 0.4% for turnover over £8m. The nature of the scheme meant that Kamal was effectively receiving a percentage of the tax avoided.
The contract was signed on 11 November 2024. Our article on Arka Wealth was published 26 February 2025. But two weeks before that, HMRC had publicly listed the company as operating a tax avoidance scheme and told the company it had unlawfully failed to disclose the scheme to HMRC. The company was doomed from that point.
On 25 July 2025, HMRC issued a tax avoidance “scheme reference number” to Umbrella Link (with the five month delay probably thanks to delaying tactics from Umbrella Link).
These companies never defend their tax positions – their (mysterious) ultimate owners just let them fold. So at some point, HMRC presented the company with a tax bill, the company ignored it, and HMRC applied for a winding up petition on 27 October 2025. A winding-up order was made on 10 December 2025.
The narrow point is that Kamal was never going to make £8m from this company. It only had a few months of operation. His claim was abusive, intended to intimidate me. As Mrs Justice Collins Rice said:
Then there is the distinctly troubling matter of the £8m claim valuation and the contract on which it was purportedly based. Mr Kamal told me at one point in his oral submissions that he was going to deal with Mr Callus’s analysis of this document, but he did not do so. The spectacularly inflated figure can to at least some extent conceivably be attributed to Mr Kamal’s ignorance of the law of libel damages and the basis on which they are assessed. Before me he asserted a reserved position on his quantum of (special) damages; he said he had not yet fully pleaded his losses, and at this early stage in the litigation that is not uncommon. But the document in its own terms, and the publicly available information about the company, do not come close to supporting an £8m figure, even without any reference to libel principles. That cannot plausibly be attributed to mistake. It is plain on the face of it that Mr Kamal had inflated the value of his claim, in his sworn particulars of claim, beyond anything he knew he had a realistic prospect of sustaining.
…
I am not prepared either to accept that the deployment of the £8m contract valuation in the context of this litigation was behaviour more likely than not attributable to simple inexpertise, particularly when considered together with the other unjustifiable and unsustainable ‘compelled speech’ remedies demanded. It may be that the Defendants viewed this behaviour with a degree of scepticism because of its very extravagance, and the expertise and advice available to them might well have encouraged that scepticism. But it is plain enough on the face of the documentary evidence that Mr Kamal intended his demands to be taken most seriously and to have a serious impact, and it appears that, to at least some extent, that was borne out in practice.
This may have consequences for Kamal, but there’s a much more important point. Tax barristers (and Kamal is not alone) are entering into contracts which are pure conflicts of interest. There is no “independence” or “integrity” to an opinion that a tax scheme works, when the barrister is paid per pound that goes into the scheme. I find it hard to believe that such contracts are permitted by the Bar Standards Board – if they are, it’s a disgrace, and if they’re not, action should be taken.
Why Kamal lost
Here’s a very brief summary of each of the points:
1. Kamal tried to sue on a Google search result. You can’t.
He complained that search engines displayed the following description of the article: “Failed tax avoidance from Arka Wealth and Setu Kamal” which he said was defamatory.6 But the rule in the Charleston case is that you can’t sue for defamation based on a headline in isolation – only on the complete publication. So Mrs Justice Collins Rice said the pleading was “bad in law” and “certain to fail”:
2. Kamal alleged I was dishonest, with zero evidential basis
He pleaded “malicious falsehood” – meaning that I wrote the article dishonestly or with an indifference to truth. But he had no basis for this, even if every fact in his pleading was accepted. So Mrs Justice Collins Rice struck this out. It was “irremediably defective”.
3. Kamal said it was “false and misleading” for me to accurately report a High Court decision
At this point Kamal approaches dishonesty. He said it was “false and misleading” for us to write that a court had found that he’d breached his duty of candour to the court. That was bizarre, because a court had found exactly that. Mrs Justice Collins Rice granted the strike-out and said Kamal’s pleading was an abuse of court processes:
4. Kamal’s attempt to compel me to apologise had no legal basis
He asked the court to order me to apologise. But courts can’t compel speech. So Mrs Justice Collins Rice struck this out too – it was “bad in law, and certain to fail”:
5. The rest of the article was just honest opinion
We then applied for summary judgment on the rest of the libel claim, on the basis that it was honest opinion. It’s unusual to obtain summary judgment on an opinion point, but in this case Kamal’s pleaded meanings for the article were “disciplinary or regulatory action ought to be taken against” Kamal, he “poses a risk to clients and the public”, he provided advice that was “reckless, unethical or incompetent” and was “professionally involved in unlawful or discredited tax avoidance schemes”. Each of these was clearly an expression of opinion, so we obtained summary judgment:
Kamal spent much of his time arguing we’d defamed him by saying he devised or advised on the particular Arka Wealth scheme in question. But this wasn’t part of Kamal’s pleaded claim – and it never could have been, because we didn’t say that. We set out evidence from Arka Wealth and Kamal himself linking him to the scheme. More on that below.
The claim was a SLAPP
At that point, I had won. But we also applied to strike out the claim under the – new and untested – anti-SLAPP rules in the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023.
This required us to establish, first, that there was a SLAPP within the definition in section 195 of the Act.
That first requires satisfying the conditions in subsections (1)(a) to (c):
We could do this without much difficulty because:
Kamal’s actions had the effect of “restraining [my] exercise of the right to freedom of speech”. Defamation actions will almost always have this effect.
The “information” disclosed by the exercise of my freedom of speech had to be “to do with economic crime”. There was some discussion about the meaning of “information” but to my (non-libel lawyer) mind this is a straightforward point – the “information” is simply the stuff that we said.
The Arka Wealth scheme was plausibly tax fraud in several countries, potentially including the UK – and those were “economic crimes” within the definition.
I had to have “reason to suspect that an economic crime may have occurred and [believe]that the disclosure of the information would facilitate an investigation into whether such a crime has (or had) occurred”. I said I did, and Kamal didn’t challenge that.
The disclosure had to be “for a purpose related to the public interest in combating economic crime”. We had said there should be an investigation; that was sufficient.
We then had to show that the condition in subsection (1)(d) was satisfied:
“Inconvenience” in particular is a very low bar, but I’d also suffered some alarm/distress at the size of the claim, and certainly significant expense. And Mrs Justice Collins Rice had no difficulty concluding that numerous elements were beyond that ordinarily encountered in litigation:
And then the difficult element: was all this intentional?
Some of it was simple incompetence, but Mrs Justice Collins Rice concluded that key elements on balance were intentional – in fact she comes close to saying that Kamal had been dishonest:
We had established the first part. The onus for the second is on the Claimant – and (for reasons which are unclear) Kamal had failed to provide any sworn evidence to the court. So Mrs Justice Collins Rice had no hesitation in disposing of the point:
That just left the question of whether the Court should exercise its discretion to strike out the case. Mrs Justice Collins Rice concluded that, in light of Kamal’s behaviour, she would:
This is delusional. It bears no relation to the actual reasons why he lost.
But what of Kamal’s complaint that he didn’t provide an opinion on the scheme?
That point was never litigated, because Kamal never pleaded it. But he couldn’t have done – because we never said that he did provide an opinion. Our report was very carefully worded and says no more than we could prove from available facts at the time.
Particularly the law of confidence, GDPR and privacy torts. ↩︎
The company was claimed to be ultimately owned by an individual resident in Mauritius, and later by an individual resident in Kazakhstan. It is likely these Companies House filings were false, unlawfully hiding the true beneficial owner. ↩︎
Promoters sometimes contest the application of the disclosure rules in front of tribunals – they have lost on almost every single occasion (the one exception was where the arrangement was disclosable, but the “promoter” targeted by HMRC wasn’t actually the promoter). ↩︎
Kamal’s actual pleadings were much more confused than this. He said he was complaining about the “slug” – the bit of the URL after the domain. But the slug was “tiktok-tax-avoidance-from-arka-wealth-why-the-government-and-the-bar-should-act” – Kamal should have referred to the website metadata that is picked up by search engines. That’s why Collins Rice J says “whatever he intended by them”. But even if he had pleaded the point competently, the rule in Charleston meant it was hopeless. ↩︎
Simon Goldberg1 and his UK-based organisation, Empower the People, are running an elaborate scheme to defraud the US Government. The group files fake US tax returns to trick the IRS into refunding their members’ everyday UK consumer spending – a practice the US tax authorities have repeatedly warned is fraudulent.
When YouTuber Salim Fadhley publicised the fraud, Goldberg reported Fadhley to the UK police for harassment, instructed a law firm to send a “cease and desist” letter, and ultimately commenced a private criminal prosecution against him in Chelmsford Magistrates’ Court.
Empower the People operates a wider pseudo-legal grift. They run bogus “mortgage-elimination” schemes – which the Financial Conduct Authority warns are scams and potentially criminal to provide. None of this is done for free – they charge £1,300 for the US tax scam, plus 13% of the return – but Empower the People fails to charge UK VAT on its services, or pay corporation tax on its profits.
We believe there should be a criminal investigation into Goldberg and his group, and that the CPS should immediately take over Goldberg’s private prosecution, and discontinue it if it is not in the public interest.2 HMRC and the FCA should also investigate what appear to be widespread breaches of tax and regulatory law.
Technical terms in this article
IRS (Internal Revenue Service)
The US federal tax authority. It processes US tax returns and sometimes issues tax refunds.
A US tax concept for the economic return on a debt instrument issued at a discount to its redemption value. It has nothing to do with everyday consumer spending.
A filing that advances arguments the IRS treats as legally baseless. The IRS can reject these filings and impose penalties. The IRS says 1099-OID schemes are “frivolous”.
A loose movement promoting pseudo-legal theories that claim (wrongly) that debts, taxes, and laws can be avoided, or cash magically generated, by using certain documents or phrases. Courts routinely reject these arguments.
Simon Goldberg says he’s found the ultimate loophole: a way to legitimately claim back almost every penny you have ever spent on everyday bills, credit cards, and mortgages, using the 1099-OID US tax form:3
The core claim is so absurd it is hard to understand how anyone believes it: whenever you pay a bill in the UK, your bank secretly creates a matching credit. Goldberg tells his followers they can claim this hidden credit as a cash refund directly from the US tax authority – the IRS. And so you can claim a cheque from the IRS covering almost all your day-to-day spending.
Goldberg says his organisation, Empower the People, will handle this entire process:
Tally up your spending: Members calculate their total spending across all bank accounts and credit cards for a given calendar year. Almost everything counts: utility bills, rent, mortgage payments, petrol, and even buying gold. Only cash withdrawals are excluded.
Hand over your passport: Members send their physical passports to Empower the People so they can apply for a US Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN).
Sign blank forms: Empower the People passes the financial figures to a secret “expert” (who calls himself “Paul Muad’ib” after the sci-fi character). Because the expert’s method is his “intellectual property”, members receive signature pages for two US tax forms(with nothing completed on the forms). They sign them in blue ink and send them back to Empower the People – pledging under penalty of perjury to the contents of a completed tax return they are never allowed to see.
Send the forms to the IRS: Empower the People couriers the forms to the IRS in carefully timed batches so it doesn’t look “bloody obvious what’s going on”.
Wait for the cheque: Goldberg promises that, if successful, the IRS will send the member a physical cheque in US dollars. He says that the IRS retains about 20% of the refund, and Empower the People takes a fee, leaving the member with a cash windfall of roughly 65% of everything they spent that year.
The cheques arrive: there is a success rate of about 50% – and Empower The People provide this proof that cheques are actually received from the IRS:4
Naturally there is a fee – an upfront “donation” of £1,300 per year claimed, plus a 13% “back-end fee”:
Members are then encouraged to “recycle” this fabricated wealth by spending it to pay off their mortgages – which they can then tally up and claim back again the following year, creating a “snowball” of debt-free cash:5
The reality
None of the claims are real. It should go without saying, but the IRS doesn’t knowingly give US tax refunds for UK consumer spending.
There have been many schemes, like Goldberg’s which use the 1099-OID form to trick the IRS into posting refund cheques. The IRS publishes an annual “dirty dozen” list of tax scams, and the 2009 list explicitly called out a 1099-OID fraud that perfectly describes Goldberg’s methodology:
These schemes are so persistent that the IRS continues to issue warnings about them, most recently including them in its 2025 list.
The US authorities do not just issue warnings; they aggressively prosecute 1099-OID promoters. In May 2024, a promoter was sentenced to five years in jail for running a scheme remarkably similar to Empower the People’s:
While most of the frauds prosecuted to date involved US citizens, international borders do not offer immunity. The IRS has successfully extradited 1099-OID fraudsters from Trinidad and Tobago and from Canada to face trial:6
In his webinars, Goldberg refers extensively to the “expert” who completes the forms – the anonymous man who calls himself “Paul Muad’ib”. We do not know who he is. It is possible he does not exist and is an invention of Goldberg. It is also possible he is a real person, with “expertise” in US tax fraud. The one thing we are certain of is that he is operating completely outside the bounds of legitimate US tax practice. If he holds a valid IRS credential, Federal regulations strictly prohibit him from charging a percentage-based fee.7 Whether credentialed or not, he is operating illegally as a ‘ghost preparer‘—charging for tax preparation but unlawfully hiding his identity from the IRS by failing to sign the returns he generates.8
How the fraud works
Goldberg provides a threadbare justification for UK residents using 1099-OID forms to claim US tax refunds: payment of bills creates a “security” and that, because “your time is priceless”, your bills have been discounted:
He says:
Because whenever you pay a bill, what you’re actually doing is creating another debt, as it were, or in many cases, new cash, a new security.
…
The fact of the matter is that your time is priceless. So whether you’re accepting a thousand pounds an hour, 200 pounds an hour or five pounds an hour, you have discounted your value, your time from infinity down to that figure. It’s been discounted. And then you issued bills and you were the original issuer of those bills.
Why does Goldberg say this? And why is one particular US tax form, the 1099-OID, so important?
A 1099-OID form is used to report “original issue discount” (OID) – taxable income generated under US Federal tax law when debt securities are issued at a discount from their maturity value. The company that issued the securities gives its investors a 1099-OID, and they include it in their US tax return. In some unusual circumstances, the issuer of the debt security will withhold US tax at 30% from the discount amount. The taxpayer can reclaim this in their US tax return – and in some cases this can result in the IRS issuing a cheque to a person. This footnote has a more complete example of how a 1099-OID normally works.9
A real 1099-OID refund scenario looks like this:
Diagram connections
Diagram connections
From Company issues $10,000 bond to investor for $9,500 cash to A year later, company redeems bond, paying investor $10,000 (Label: None)
From A year later, company redeems bond, paying investor $10,000 to Company withholds $150 tax from this (i.e. 30% of the $500 OID) and pays to IRS (Label: None)
From Company withholds $150 tax from this (i.e. 30% of the $500 OID) and pays to IRS to Company gives investor 1099-OID showing $500 OID and $150 withheld (Label: None)
From Company gives investor 1099-OID showing $500 OID and $150 withheld to Investor files tax return with 1099-OID and claims credit/refund of the $150 (Label: None)
None of this has anything to do with personal bank or credit card transactions. And nothing Goldberg says bears any relation to what is on an actual 1099-OID form, and his nonsense about our time being discounted bears no relation to the actual US tax definition of “original issue discount” in 26 U.S.C. § 1273(a)(1) (as explained in IRS guidance). Most importantly: at no point does Goldberg explain how a withholding tax refund can possibly be due, when his clients never suffered any US withholding tax in the first place.
Any feature of a tax system which can result in a cash payment by a tax authority is vulnerable to fraud10 – and that’s the problem with 1099-OIDs.
The essence of the fraud is simple: fabricate a 1099-OID to show withholding tax that you never suffered, and use it to claim a refund:
Diagram connections
Diagram connections
From UK consumer spends $10,000 to 'Expert' fabricates 1099-OID showing $10,000 of OID and $10,000 of tax withheld. No tax was actually withheld (Label: None)
From 'Expert' fabricates 1099-OID showing $10,000 of OID and $10,000 of tax withheld. No tax was actually withheld to EtP files tax forms showing $10,000 of income and overpaid tax of $8,000 (Label: None)
From EtP files tax forms showing $10,000 of income and overpaid tax of $8,000 to IRS retains 20% of the $10,000 as tax and refunds the remaining $8,000 (Label: None)
In principle, the IRS should always be able to spot this, because they should be able to see that they never received the withholding tax.11 In practice the timing of returns and refunds mean that the IRS often pays out refunds before it has reconciled refund claims with the filings it has received. The reconciliation also seems imperfect, probably because of the very large volumes and antiquated systems – so some 1099-OID frauds continue for a while before being discovered.
How much tax is being defrauded?
Empower the People’s 1099-OID scheme seems to have started in 2022. This cheque, from the webinar slide deck, shows it was issued in October 2022 and relates to tax year 2018.12
At its 2023 Annual General Meeting (AGM), the organisation boasted to members that it had processed 80 claims that year.
While the 2024 AGM presentation omitted the exact number of claims, it did reveal the group’s revenue from the scheme:
Based on their fee structure, this revenue implies they successfully defrauded the IRS of around $1m during the 2023-24 period.13
This number is actually surprisingly low if we check it against other claims by Empower the People. If people really were claiming refund cheques for house purchases14, the annual number would be significantly higher than $1m. Similarly, if Simone Marshall (co-founder of Empower the People) was correct when she said in this 2024 interview15 that they’d received a $536,000 cheque the previous week, then annual refunds would greatly exceed $1m.
There is a linked organisation, “You and Your Cash“. The relationship between Empower the People and You and Your Cash is not clear to us; in the interests of clarity we will refer only to Empower the People throughout this report. Both are unincorporated associations.17 There are a number of relatedcompanies which all appear to be dormant.
The reality is that Simon Goldberg (who sometimes calls himself “The Spaniard”) and Empower the People are part of what they call the “truth movement”, and most outside observers call the “sovereign citizen” movement.18Sovereign citizens claim to believe19 that the legal and financial system is a conspiracy, and that by using the right documents or forms of words, a person can exempt themselves from laws, eliminate debt and create money out of nothing (often by claiming tax refunds for tax that wasn’t paid).
These “pseudolaw” theories originated in the US but are now increasingly common here. These claims have no legal foundation, and as far as we’re aware, they’ve failed every time they’ve reached a court in the UK, the US, Canada or Australia (the countries where sovereign citizens are most prevalent). There is a magisterial analysis of sovereign citizen legal positions in the Canadian judgment Meads v Meads.20 We have reported on one of the most financially successful sovereign citizens, Iain Clifford Stamp.
Goldberg is unusual for a sovereign citizen in that the true nature of his beliefs, and the services he sells to members/clients, is not readily apparent. He went as far as denying to us that he was a sovereign citizen. But in this video, no longer online, he is much more candid:
Goldberg says:
He’s a “sovereign movement” (at 33:21)
Everyone has a “straw man” – the sovereign citizen belief that everyone is attached to a corporate legal entity (at 25:41 and 53:07)
Governments guarantee everyone’s debt (at 29:25)
Judges are bankers (at 27:26) – because “they sit on the bench, which is an archaic word for “bank”
Birth certificates are a “financial bond” (at 43:58)
We also obtained a copy of this presentation which sets out similar views:
Goldberg told us the presentation does not reflect his views and was used in a session to “debunk pseudo‑legal theories circulating online.”. But it is completely consistent with the views Goldberg himself expounds in the video above. The 1099-OID reclaim scheme webinars are full of sovereign citizen tropes, including that that everyday banking operates under “the law of the sea” (admiralty law).
As with many fringe political movements, the sovereign citizen movement is fragmented, with different groups often feuding with each other. Goldberg and Stamp have a particular animus, and both have published numerous articles and videos saying the other is fraudulent.22
The private prosecution
Salim Fadhley presents a YouTube channel exposing conspiracy theories.
In Spring 2025, Fadhley published a series of videos criticising Goldberg. Here the first of the videos23 – Fadhley refers to “The Spaniard”, which is the name Goldberg often uses online:
if you have time, we would recommend watching this video and judging the tone and content for yourself before reading the rest of this section of our report.
Goldberg subsequently reported Fadhley to the police for harassment, and then commenced a private criminal prosecution against Fadhley and two other individuals. Goldberg himself is the private prosecutor, instructing a reputable barrister – Gary Summers of 9BR Chambers – to act for him. Goldberg crowdsourced donations to pay the legal fees.
Chelmsford Magistrates’ Court granted the summonses on 25 September 2025, and the barrister’s chambers published a press release. This goes much further than merely announcing the fact of the summonses, and states as fact that there was a “campaign of online harassment” and that the defendants “engaged in a pattern of defamatory, abusive, and racially charged communications across multiple platforms”. It adds that:
Despite opportunities for constructive engagement, the three individuals chose instead to continue to weaponize social media, targeting EtP’s trustees, members, and partners with falsehoods and inflammatory content which were not expressions of free speech but calculated efforts to harass, intimidate, defame, and destabilise.
We infer that this was drafted by Goldberg and/or Empower the People, not the barrister.
The prosecution is currently adjourned pending determination by the Crown Prosecution Service of whether to take it over. The next hearing is listed for 20 April 2026.
Given the contempt of court rules, we will not express any view on the harassment allegations. It is, however, our view that – on the basis of the evidence presented in this report – it is not in the public interest for Goldberg to be a private prosecutor. We will, therefore, be asking the CPS to take over the prosecution, and discontinue it if it is not in the public interest.
(We understand that Goldberg is also crowdsourcing a private prosecution of Iain Stamp. Whatever our views of Stamp, in our view it cannot be in the public interest for Goldberg to prosecute him.)
Before commencing the prosecution, Goldberg instructed a law firm, Artington Legal, to send this “cease and desist” letter to Fadhley:
In our view this was an improper letter for a solicitor to send to an unrepresented individual:
Meritless threats: It states that Fadhley faces potential prosecution for breaches of GDPR by “obtaining or disclosing personal data without consent”. Obtaining personal data is not, in itself, a breach of GDPR. Furthermore, there is no suggestion in the letter that Fadhley actually disclosed personal data at all. This threat of prosecution for GDPR breaches appears meritless and contrary to the SRA guidance on SLAPPs.
Ignoring journalistic exemptions: The letter entirely disregards the significant exceptions to GDPR that apply when processing is for journalistic purposes and the publisher reasonably believes it is in the public interest. The ICO expressly recognises that journalism is not limited to traditional media and applies to independent YouTubers.
Unparticularised claims: The letter makes broad, completely unparticularised allegations of defamation, which is again contrary to the SRA’s warning notices on abusive litigation and SLAPPs. The letter doesn’t even attempt to say what statements are being complained of, much less why they are defamatory.
Misrepresenting civil procedure: The letter concludes: “Failure to respond or comply will be treated as a refusal to remedy your breaches, and our client will take the necessary steps to protect their rights and interests without further notice to you”. This statement is untrue. A solicitor knows that their client cannot simply commence civil court action “without further notice”. The Civil Procedure Rules require pre-action letters to be sent in a specific format, which this letter does not follow.
The evidence for the 1099-OID fraud
This report is based on extensive documentation and video evidence provided by multiple independent sources.
The mechanics of the entire reclaim process are set out in detail in Empower the People’s “Standard Operating Procedure” document (which we obtained from two separate sources):
Clients participating in the scheme sign up online:
And are then required to sign this contract:
We are always meticulous before publishing allegations of fraud, and we presented our documentary evidence to Goldberg well in advance of publication. His response was not just to deny committing fraud – he outright denied that Empower the People provided any 1099-OID services at all:
And:
He even went so far as to claim the “Standard Operating Procedures” manual was fabricated as some kind of decoy:
All of this is a lie.
Here is a promotional flyer for an Empower the People webinar in August 2022, explicitly advertising a 1099-OID scheme:
And here is a complete recording of that webinar, in which Goldberg details exactly how his organisation runs its 1099-OID operation:24
We also obtained a recording of another, shorter, webinar, we believe from Spring 2023, covering much of the same ground:25
The video snippets interspersed throughout this report are drawn directly from these two recordings. Both webinars use this Powerpoint slide deck – the author in the metadata is “Simone Marshall”, co-founder of Empower the People.26
We can go back a little and see how the operation was set up. Here is Goldberg, at a members’ meeting in 2022, explaining that they’ve hired someone to operationalise the fraud by hiring “Ambia”, who they describe as a “1099 expert” because she has “undergone the 1099 process with Simon [Goldberg], and is very confident in the process and how to do it. She will be taking on that process when we roll that product… that benefit out, which is very imminent”:
And we can jump forward to see some of the claims made more recently. Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Simone Marshall (co-founder of Empower the People) in 2024.27. She discusses how Empower the People’s “1099 service” is much more effective than the service provided by their rival, Ian Stamp/Matrix Freedom:
“The only person in the UK that is successfully doing this is Spaniard [i.e. Goldberg]. He’s been doing it for three years now. Last week we had a cheque for $536,000, alright? So it works. Simon wouldn’t do stuff if it doesn’t work or if it’s going to hurt somebody. It’s all about reputation.”
(We are sceptical of the claim she received a cheque for $536,000. That seems much larger than the other indications of the scale of the operation.)
There is little reference to the 1099-OID scheme on the public internet, but there are traces – for example on the “You and Your cash” affiliate page28 it says:
1099 OID Essentials is not included, but 1099 OID Claims are – see the 1099 Session on Jedii Interactive for more details.
We wrote to Goldberg that he had lied to us in his initial written response. We have not received a reply.
Have Goldberg and his team committed fraud?
We believe this report demonstrates there is sufficient evidence for a criminal investigation of Empower the People and, if supported by that investigation, a prosecution.
The IRS aggressively prosecutes promoters of 1099-OID schemes for tax fraud, and sometimes prosecutes scheme participators (and anyone who signs a US tax form they haven’t read is in a very precarious legal position). So it seems reasonably clear that Goldberg and his colleagues are at risk of a US federal prosecution.
However, given that the participants, promoters, and evidence are overwhelmingly based in the UK, this may be a case where a UK prosecution of the promoters is more appropriate.29
Here is how the Crown Prosecution Service summarises the offence of fraud by false representation:30
The Empower the People scheme involves a series of blatant false representations: that the client’s ordinary consumer spending was “original issue discount”; that a large amount of tax was withheld when in fact none was; and that a tax refund was due when the IRS explicitly states it is not.
The scheme intends to make a gain for Empower the People’s clients (through the refunds) and for Empower the People itself (through the upfront and back-end fees it charges). It is therefore defrauding both the IRS and Empower the People’s own clients.31
The crucial legal question is whether those involved were “dishonest.” Under English law, this means asking whether their conduct was dishonest by the standards of ordinary decent people (regardless of whether the individuals themselves believed at the time that they were being dishonest).32
The leading textbook of criminal law and practice, Archbold, states:
“In most cases the jury will need no further direction than the short two-limb test in Barton “(a) what was the defendant’s actual state of knowledge or belief as to the facts and (b) was his conduct dishonest by the standards of ordinary decent people?”
In our view it is highly likely that Goldberg and his team knew full well that the IRS views 1099-OID schemes as illegitimate. We base this on the following five points:
1. Basic research reveals the fraud
As noted above, the IRS has included 1099-schemes in its “dirty dozen” list of tax scams, starting in 2009 and continuing to the most recent list in 2025. A simple Google search for “1099-OID scheme” reveals many websites explaining the fraud, including a Wikipedia page and a report of a successful IRS prosecution of a scheme looking almost identical to Goldberg’s scheme. It strains credulity to believe that Goldberg and his team did not see any of this, particularly after Salim Fadhley publicly accused him of fraud.
2. A massive rejection rate
Goldberg says their “success rate” is 45 to 50%33. No legitimate adviser sees half their tax forms rejected. This alone should have put him on notice that the IRS did not accept his legal positions.
Furthermore, Goldberg admits they have had filings formally rejected as “frivolous”.34. He gives the impression this is a minor administrative hurdle, but a basic Google search would have revealed that it is serious for a filing to be rejected as frivolous. Indeed that same Google search would have revealed an IRS notice which specifically describes Goldberg’s own scheme as frivolous, and would have revealed recent prosecutions for essentially the same scheme.
To explain away this high failure rate, Goldberg invented a story blaming rogue IRS staff for throwing applications in the bin to reduce their workload:35
OK, but someone in their bloody wisdom decided that, well, I’ve got all this backlog of paperwork where people have been working from home or they’ve been off sick or they’ve decided to jack it in. And in fact, a lot of people that were in the US that were from other countries were sent home. So a load of cheap workers left, which left the IRS short on staff, created a backlog. And so what did someone do? What’s the easiest way to get rid of a paper backlog, do you reckon? Well, let me tell you what some bright spark decided to do was bin all the paperwork over at the IRS. I know it sounds ridiculous, I know it sounds hard to believe, but a member of staff actually trashed a whole load of paperwork in order to get rid of it. I guess that’s one way of clearing a backlog but anyhow they were then found out. There was an audit conducted on the IRS – I think it was by the Fed – and they discovered that this had happened and it all blew up and was reported in the Washington Post.
3. Empower the People deliberately stagger their form submissions to prevent detection
Goldberg explicitly states that Empower the People does not submit all client forms at once. They stagger them so that the authorities do not notice what they are doing:
“It goes by courier to the IRS to make sure it doesn’t get lost in the bloody post, all right. Now from the moment it’s been couriered – because we have to time this, we don’t send them reams of stuff and hundreds of cases all at once because then it’s bloody obvious what’s going on. We don’t want it to be obvious what’s going on. We want these things to slip in with what the elite are doing, and what the nobles are doing, and what the bankers are doing.”
“So the IRS are on the lookout for people that are processing these claims because we’re not supposed to, we’re not part of that elite group. We’re not part of their club. So they don’t necessarily know everyone that’s not part of the club, right? So they’re on the lookout.”
This strongly implies a consciousness of guilt – an understanding that the IRS would reject the refunds if they understood what was going on.
4. Empower the People ensure their clients never see the tax forms submitted in their name The clients don’t ever see what’s written on the tax forms that bear their signature:37
“Then we’re going to need certainly digital files, so scans of the passport to be sent over through [their admin assistant], through us to the expert38 so that the expert can create the forms for you and complete the forms for you
And you will be provided with the signature pages only because the actual mechanism that has been formulated by the expert – it is his intellectual property.”
People are signing US tax forms, under penalty of perjury, without knowing what they contain. The IRS says “never sign a blank tax form“, but that is exactly what Empower the People requires. British citizens are signing US federal tax forms, under penalty of perjury, without knowing what they contain.
We’ve never heard a tax adviser claim that the way they complete simple tax forms is valuable intellectual property. We expect the reality is more sinister: if the clients saw the completed 1040-NR and 1099-OID forms, they might immediately see that they were committing perjury. They would see a form falsely claiming that a UK bank39 withheld thousands of dollars in US federal income tax, which is obviously untrue (and Goldberg at no point even mentions withholding tax to his clients). By only providing the signature pages, the “expert” ensures the client remains entirely ignorant of the specific lies being submitted to the US government in their name.
5. Internal fears of IRS scrutiny
A source provided us with an internal chat log between Empower the People staff during their 2025 AGM, in which EtP’s “paralegal” said:
“Unfortunately, arseholes like Stamp and now that Salim guy have most probably raised the bar of scrutiny at the IRS.”
Conclusion
Even if Goldberg and his colleagues began as true believers in sovereign citizen theories, a jury could well conclude that, as time went on, they must have realised that their core claims were untrue. If so, we expect most ordinary decent people would say that their behaviour was dishonest. Ultimately that is something a jury would have to decide.
What else does Empower the People do?
While the 1099-OID scheme targets the US government, Empower the People also runs a sprawling pseudo-legal operation targeting UK institutions, local authorities, and consumers. Here’s their description of upcoming projects at a 2022 meeting:
“1099 reclaims” is the US tax fraud discussed in this report (and which Goldberg denied to us that he operates). The others are various sovereign citizen-style pseudo-legal services which Empower the People sell to their members (for a fee).
Most of their claims are now hidden behind members-only logins, but some are still available, for example:
” If you know what you’re doing, and if you understand why it works, and your true relationship to the SYSTEM and in particular the CORPORATE STATE, then “yes”, you can clear debts using nothing more than a signature! “
The explanation for why this works is incoherent:
A source provided us with a complete set of the documents which Empower the People use to provide these services. This includes standard-form templates as well as drafted client letters. We will not be publishing all the documents,40 but a few examples show how the operation is both dangerous and absurd.
This is Empower the People’s “acceptance for value” template. It purports to discharge debts by “accepting” a bill as a money order and appointing the creditor as “fiduciary trustee” to set off the account. This is a standardsovereign citizenapproach, and it is legally meaningless.
This is a template document intended to nullify a Transport for London penalty. It relies on an incomprehensible claim that the then-Secretary of State for Transport, Grant Shapps, was appointed by Empower the People under a power of attorney (similar documents are discussed here):
Much of Empower the People’s activity involves charging adherents for pseudo-legal documents that supposedly will eliminate mortgage debt. In this arena, they’re competing with Iain Stamp. Like Stamp’s operation, the documents are an incoherent mixture of legal misunderstandings and conspiracy theories, none of which are recognised by English law.
A slight variation in the Empower the People documents is that the correspondence is directed to the Land Registry rather than to the client’s bank. Here’s an example:
When that correspondence is (inevitably and correctly) ignored by the Land Registry, Empower the People send further rounds of correspondence, and eventually (after ten letters) send a final letter claiming that the failure to respond gives rise to a massive financial penalty. In this example they claimed the Chief Executive of the Land Registry had, by ignoring their correspondence, assented to pay a penalty of £39m:41
This is nonsense. It is a fundamental principle of English law that you cannot create a contract where another party’s silence is deemed acceptance. We are unaware of any court in England, or indeed in the English speaking world, accepting arguments like this.42
These activities present a severe risk to consumers, who may be fooled into paying steep fees for documents that have zero legal effect. Worse, by following this “advice,” clients may end up defaulting on their mortgages and losing their homes.
The Financial Conduct Authority published a notice in 2022 warning consumers from dealing with people like Empower the People. The FCA said that they believed these services constituted “claims management services” requiring regulatory authorisation. The FCA’s prosecution of Goldberg’s rival, Iain Stamp, states the FCA also believes these activities breach the prohibition on unauthorised debt counselling, mortgage advice and financial promotions. The regulatory experts we spoke to agree with this assessment.
These regulatory breaches may amount to a criminal offence.
The FCA told us:
“We can’t comment on individuals.
We have warned consumers about false claims that they can avoid having to pay their mortgage, taxes or other debt.
We would urge any consumers who are struggling to speak to their lender and ask for support.”
Failure to pay UK tax
As well as facilitating US tax fraud for its members, Empower the People appears to be systematically failing to pay its own UK taxes.
Here is Empower the People’s accounts for 2024, published at their AGM:
As an unincorporated association carrying on a trade, Empower the People is subject to corporation tax – but the accounts from this and previous years suggest no corporation tax has ever been paid.43
The payments members make to join the 1099-OID scheme are described as “donations” but obviously are not – they are fixed payments for a specific service.44 That, and the fact the group’s revenue is above the £90,000 registration threshold, means the payments are subject to VAT.45 Empower the People should be registered for VAT, and accounting to HMRC for VAT on the fees it receives for the services it provides. We believe it does not.
We asked Simon Goldberg why Empower the People appeared to pay no VAT or corporation tax. He did not respond.
It may be relevant that, in this video from 2013, Goldberg claims that tax is voluntary:
Goldberg’s justification is that tax legislation applies to “person” but, “according to the Acts of Parliament and the Interpretation Act, the definition of the word ‘person’ is an artificial entity, corporate soul or legal fiction”. It’s an obviously false claim, rebutted by one look at the legislation, but US sovereign citizens have been making similar arguments, and failing in court, for decades.46
Where did Goldberg get these ideas?
Simone Mitchell, co-founder of Empower the People was recently interviewed on a podcast. She told the host that Goldberg “studied under Winston Shrout”.47 And Goldberg himself said at a meeting that “having woken up, [he] went to some Winston Shrout seminars”:
Failure to safeguard its members personal information
Empower the People is taking advantage of vulnerable and naive people by selling them schemes that are in some cases just ineffective, and in some cases criminal. There’s an additional problem: a complete failure to safeguard their data.
The breach is more than technical. The day after we published this article we were contacted by several people who had noticed that Empower the People stored client/members’ documents on their website without any security.49 Anyone could go to a standard WordPress API endpoint and see a complete list of all the files on the website, including pseudo-legal documents drafted for their members (for example claiming millions of pounds from the Land Registry).
We discussed this with information security specialists who told us that this kind of vulnerability is routinely discovered by automated scanning tools that continuously crawl the internet looking for these kinds of misconfiguration. Criminal groups routinely use automated scanning tools to locate websites with exactly this type of misconfiguration and harvest exposed documents for identity theft, fraud, or resale. The specialists we spoke to said that vulnerabilities of this type are commonly discovered within days or weeks by automated scanners, and that it was therefore plausible that the documents had already been indexed or downloaded by third parties.
We reported the vulnerability to Empower the People the next day, 27 February. We didn’t receive a response, but soon after, they blocked direct access to the documents. However they failed to block access to the complete list of documents, including the names of many of their clients/members. We wrote to Empower the People again on 3 March reporting this; access to that list has now been secured. We didn’t receive a response, although it seems Empower the People has asked its members to write to us complaining about the data breach. Those complaints would be better directed at Empower the People.50
Before we knew about the vulnerability, we received a large number of Empower the People’s internal documents (perhaps obtained through this vulnerability, perhaps otherwise). We’re passing them all to the authorities but will not retain copies of any personal information.
Many thanks to B for initial research, K, P and C for their US tax expertise; P, C and M for additional research; C2 for UK regulatory insight; N for advice on the mutual trading exception; and Michael Gomulka and A for English criminal law advice. Thanks to J for invaluable comments on a late draft, and to Dr S for picking up errors on timestamps.
Footnotes
An obvious point: Simon Goldberg is a fairly common name, and a search on the internet for Simon Goldberg finds people who are nothing to do with the Goldberg that is the subject of this article. ↩︎
This case illustrates a known problem with private prosecutions; the lack of any assurance that the private prosecutor is acting in the public interest. The Government closed a consultation on the subject last year, and it’s widely expected that the law will change in the next two years to introduce a mandatory code of practice, separate investigative and prosecutorial functions, a requirement for private prosecutors to meet the Director of Public Prosecutions’ (DPP) public interest test, and to introduce an accreditation system and regular inspections for private prosecutors. ↩︎
This and other video excerpts in this report are compiled from the webinars in the evidence section below. Here we have edited together different sections so as to clearly show what is proposed in one video, and added subtitles. The edit is consistent with the overall message, as is clear if you watch the whole of the webinars. ↩︎
We have not been able to verify if the images are genuine, but we expect that they are. Recent US prosecutions of people running these schemes (discussed below) show that the schemes can be extremely successful, at least in the short/medium term. And it would make little sense for EtP to continue to operate the scheme for four years if nobody ever received a cheque. So EtP’s claimed success rate of 50% may or may not be accurate, but we expect that their clients have received a material number of cheques (and the figures discussed below support that). ↩︎
This clip illustrates what a peculiar organisation Empower the People is: it starts with nonsensical claims into creating a “snowball” of free cash from IRS using an obvious fraud, then segues into detailed and rather sensible advice as to how to pay down your mortgage. ↩︎
Although it is possible that in the Goldberg case, a defendant could successfully argue that it is more appropriate to prosecute in the UK, given that is where the witnesses and evidence are. The offences that were extradited had more connection to the US, including the use of US bank accounts. ↩︎
When a person prepares a tax return for someone else they are supposed to obtain a “preparer tax identification number“, add it to the return and sign the return, which is then signed by the taxpayer. Empower the People’s “expert” doesn’t do this. He is a “ghost preparer” – invisible to the IRS (there’s another excellent article on that subject here). ↩︎
A company issues securities with a face value of $10,000 to an investor. The securities are issued at a discount, so the investor pays $9,500. A year later, the securities redeem for $10,000. The company provides the investor with a 1099-OID form showing the company’s name and the $500 of “original issue discount” income (in box 1). The investor then includes this income in their US tax return.
If the investor is a UK resident then, in very rare cases, the company would be required to withhold US tax at 30% on the “original issue discount” of $500. So it withholds $150 and pays the investor $350. It gives the investor a 1099-OID form specifying the company’s name and (in box 4) the $150 of tax the company withheld.
It must be stressed that this is a highly unusual scenario. We spoke to three experienced US tax counsel, and none had ever seen “original issue discount” withholding applied to UK retail investors – box 4 is usually empty. That’s because in practice the withholding tax exemption for “portfolio interest” would almost always apply. The cases where that exemption wouldn’t apply – e.g. securities held by banks, bearer securities, securities where the interest is contingent on profits – are unlikely to be relevant to debt securities held by normal UK investors.
But in this unusual case, it would make sense for the UK retail investor to complete a US tax return and obtain a refund of the $150 of tax withheld. They obtain a US tax number from the US and complete a US tax return, using form 1040-NR, and file it together with the 1099-OID given to them by the issuer. The investor isn’t subject to US tax on the original issue discount income (because they’re not resident in the US) but they get a credit for the $150 on the 1099-OID. If the investor had no US taxable income at all, they’d receive a cash cheque for $150. ↩︎
The withholding tax is in most reported fraud cases equal to the “discount” – that should ring alarm bells given the actual withholding tax rate is 30%, not 100%. And a further bell should ring because, when the issuer of a debt security gives a 1099-OID to an investor, they file an identical copy to the IRS – a modern tax system really should only issue refunds once withholding tax payments and 1099-OID forms have been received, and basic initial checks have been satisfied. ↩︎
It’s common in these frauds to file for retrospective reclaims. ↩︎
If we assume they processed 80 claims in 2024, then the total initial fees were 80 x £1,300 = £104k. The chart shows about £230k of income – if the additional £126k represents the 13% back-end fee then that implies around £1m of refunds were obtained, i.e. $1.3m. Of course it’s possible that there were more claims in 2024 than 2023, which would mean more of the £230k comes from the initial fee and less from the 13%, implying a lower level of refunds. We don’t know if that’s the case, so believe it’s fair to say “around $1m”. ↩︎
There are, perhaps, three possibilities. First, our estimate could simply be wrong – the fees may not work our in the way we infer from Empower the People documents – and the refunds larger than our estimate above. Second, our estimate could be correct, and Goldberg/Marshall are exaggerating – the refunds are much less successful, or much smaller, than they suggest. Third, the refunds are much larger but the money is not all being booked in Empower the People’s accounts, for whatever reason. ↩︎
You and Your Cash claims to be a “private trust”, but probably isn’t. ↩︎
In 2010, the FBI said it regarded sovereign citizens as domestic terrorists – for the very good reason that people who claim laws don’t apply to them tend to attack public authorities, courts and police officers. Since then, it’s become common for people promoting sovereign citizen ideology to vehemently deny that they’re sovereign citizens. We should be clear that we don’t regard this group as terrorists, or indeed as physically dangerous in any way. The combination of sovereign citizen ideology and US gun rights means that the position in the US is much more dangerous than that in the UK. Here, whilst there have been cases of sovereign citizen violence, they have been much more limited. ↩︎
We say “claim to believe” because sovereign citizen “gurus” often make large amounts of money by selling sovereign citizen schemes, and it’s often not clear if they really believe what they say, or it’s just a scam. ↩︎
An archaic statute which is probably no longer in force, but at the time provided a practical solution for the families people lost at sea by deeming them to be dead after seven years. It appears at some point someone in the US confused the name of this Act with “cestui que trust” – an archaic term for beneficiary. This became a common sovereign citizen belief, and is used by fraudsters in the UK to sell fake car insurance. The Ministry of Justice has received dozens of Freedom of Information Act applications from people convinced “cestui que vie” trusts are real, and now refer people to the detailed response noted above. ↩︎
We would caution against relying on anything that either person (or their organisation) says. For example this article, which accuses Goldberg of US tax fraud, appears to be AI written and references to documents/sources that are not provided and may not exist. This article does not use anyone connected with Stamp as a source, and our article on Stamp does not use anyone connected with Goldberg as a source. ↩︎
Fadhley mentioned Goldberg in an earlier video, but only in passing. ↩︎
AI-generated transcript here, or here with time markings. We should add that we are not completely certain this is the exact webinar promoted by the flyer above – the time of year appears to match, but there could be an additional webinar around the same time which we have not yet obtained. ↩︎
AI-generated transcript here, or here with time markings. This video, unlike the previous one, shows images of participants during the Q&A at the end. We have blanked out the participants except for Goldberg, out of fairness to people who may in some cases be victims of a fraud. Note that the audio is very out of sync by about 45 seconds – we haven’t corrected this because we didn’t want to modify the file (beyond the redaction). ↩︎
Noting of course that metadata can easily be added, removed and altered by anyone at any time; it’s not evidence that the document is genuine (the preponderance of other evidence makes that clear beyond reasonable doubt) but is an indication that she prepared the slides. ↩︎
We are linking to our archive of the page, because we anticipate it will be amended shortly. It was live on 26 February 2026. ↩︎
We expect the police/CPS would not prosecute the scheme participants. A case could be made that they are involved in a conspiracy to defraud and/or fraud by false representation, but establishing dishonesty for the retail participants would be much more difficult than for the promoters. ↩︎
There are other possible offences, for example conspiracy to defraud. ↩︎
The clients might not feel defrauded if they end up making money, but (based on Goldberg’s own figures) roughly half pay fees and never receive a refund; furthermore, those receiving a refund may eventually be required by the IRS to repay it with penalties. ↩︎
The subjective element of the test for dishonesty (see Ghosh (1982)) was removed by Ivey [2017] for civil cases, and that decision was confirmed to apply to criminal cases in Barton [2020]. The fact that a defendant might plead he or she was acting in line with what others were doing, and therefore did not believe it to be dishonest, is no longer relevant if the jury finds they knew what they were doing and it was objectively dishonest. ↩︎
See the second video, 01:06:57 to 01:07:53, and 01:11:51 to 01:12:08 ↩︎
The Washington Post reference may be a complete misreading of this event – the IRS destroyed 30 million paper-filed information returns (1099s and W-2s filed by third-party companies, not personal tax returns) because their antiquated software was being taken offline for the 2021 tax season. It wouldn’t have impacted Goldberg’s 1099-OID claims. ↩︎
This is from the second webinar, cropping out the other participants (thus the low resolution). Note that the audio is very out of sync. ↩︎
That’s the anonymous person who calls himself “Paul Muad’ib” after the sci-fi character.↩︎
Another possibility is that the form is completed in line with the sovereign citizen conspiracy theory that everyone has an “all caps name” which is a company, and their “all caps name” is stated as the issuer. That seems less likely; we’d hope the IRS’s systems would pick up if JANE SMITH LIMITED was a stated issuer on a 1099-OID. ↩︎
We are withholding the bulk of the documents because of the obvious concern that they could be adapted for use by other sovereign citizen groups, and we have no desire to add to the burden on the public authorities, courts, and businesses who have to deal with this nonsense. If any researchers or authorities would like a copy of the documents, please get in touch. ↩︎
In principle this kind of correspondence could amount to a criminal offence, such as fraud by false representation or blackmail. In practice it tends to just be binned. ↩︎
Although others have certainly tried to play games by pretending that someone can be forced to agree to pay penalties by magical contractual wording. ↩︎
In our view EtP is clearly carrying on a trade of providing services. The fact the services may be illegal does not prevent it from being taxable (and see also here). The “donations” are in our opinion taxable income, either because they are in reality payments for services, or under the rule in Falkirk Ice Rink. Many of the expenses won’t be deductible, particularly any which amount to the commission of an offence. The “mutual trading” exception is unlikely to apply because some members are being charged large fees to participate in the 1099-OID scheme, but (broadly speaking) they don’t get any enhanced rights to the association’s surplus. The very commercial nature of the fees charged for the services also feels unlike a normal mutual trading situation. ↩︎
The leading case on this point involves a Dutchman called Mr Tolsma, who played a barrel organ on a street corner and invited passers by to leave donations. The Dutch tax authorities claimed he had to account for VAT on these payments, because he was making a supply (or barrel organ music) to those passing by. The court disagreed; the passers-by heard the music whether or not they made a donation. There was no “necessary link” between the musical service and the payments to which it gave rise. There is a “necessary link” between Empower the People’s 1099-OID services and the “donations” they charge. ↩︎
Often relying, as Goldberg does in this video, on looking up words in an old US legal dictionary, and thinking that has force of law, and indeed overrides statute law. ↩︎
Their website is run on WordPress, a standard platform for hosting websites, with a “plugin” that enabled pages for members to be secured. However the plugin did not secure the members’ documents, which anybody could access, and the API was not locked down. ↩︎
The exposure may constitute a breach of the UK GDPR. Personal data must be processed “in a manner that ensures appropriate security”, including protection against unauthorised access (Article 5(1)(f) and Article 32 UK GDPR). Leaving members’ documents accessible through a public API for an extended period strongly suggests that appropriate technical and organisational measures were not in place. In addition, organisations that become aware of a personal-data breach must notify the Information Commissioner’s Office within 72 hours if the breach is likely to pose a risk to individuals (Article 33). Where the risk is high – for example because personal documents have been exposed – the affected individuals must also be informed (Article 34). Failure to implement adequate security measures or to notify the ICO of a notifiable breach can lead to regulatory investigation, enforcement action, and potentially substantial financial penalties. ↩︎
Earlier this week, Finance Monthly published an article presented as an interview with me. No such interview took place. I was not contacted. I did not answer questions. The claim that Finance Monthly “spoke with” me is false.
The piece reads like generic AI/large-language-model output: heavy use of em dashes, and lots of vague grand-sounding generalisations. The otherinterviewsfound on the website look similar – I don’t know if the interviews are real (but written up with AI) or entirely fake, like mine.
Finance Monthly was previously best known for issuing fake awards for cash. In 2017, a reporter from RollOnFriday nominated a fake Cypriot water taxi business for a “Finance Monthly Game Changers” award. It won, and was offered a £2,495 “winners’ package”. The following year, RollOnFriday submitted a fake Nigerian firm; it also won after Finance Monthly’s “research department” claimed to have conducted “extensive reviews”.
Finance Monthly now seems to have diversified – as well as fake interviews, it carries promotion for dubious cryptocurrency providers. One of of these appears to be an investment fraud. Supposedly it’s “cloud-based cryptocurrency mining”, but the figures are impossible. Cryptocurrency mining is a low margincommodity business. This doesn’t stop the Finance Monthly article from promising a return of 74% in 38 days, which equates to a 200x return over a year – pure fantasy. The editors of Finance Monthly either didn’t read this or don’t understand the basics of finance and investment.
I emailed Finance Monthly asking why they published a fake interview with me. They did not respond. Shortly before this article was published, the page was removed without explanation.
As has been widely reported, Peter Mandelson forwarded confidential Government documents to Jeffrey Epstein, and advised the CEO of JPMorgan to “mildly threaten” the Chancellor of the Exchequer. This article considers the prospect of prosecuting Mr Mandelson for these acts.
Our view, on the basis of discussions with barristers and solicitors specialising in criminal and regulatory law is that:
There is a realistic prospect that Mr Mandelson could be convicted for misconduct in public office. However, the archaic nature of the offence means that there is material uncertainty. In particular, it would be necessary to prove that Mr Mandelson either knew his actions were wrong, or that he was reckless as to whether they were wrong.
There is also a realistic prospect that Mr Mandelson could be convicted for fraud by false representation, if (as Mr Starmer says) he lied in the process that led to his appointment as US Ambassador. It would be necessary to prove that Mr Mandelson dishonestly made a false statement, intending to make a gain (the salary from the role).
The various other criminal offences that have been discussed (such as insider dealing and the Official Secrets Act) are unlikely to apply.1
The Financial Conduct Authority should consider whether civil penalties could be applied to Mr Mandelson under the “market abuse” legislation – this is highly fact-dependent.
We assume throughout that the documents published by ourselves and others are authentic, and that the emails in those documents which appear to be sent by Mr Mandelson were in fact sent by him. We have no reason to doubt this is the case (and Mr Mandelson has not denied his authorship of the emails).
The views expressed in this article reflect the evidence of Mr Mandelson’s dealings with Mr Epstein that is in the public domain as at 7 February 2026. If further evidence comes to light (for example, further emails) then our views may change.
Nothing in this article constitutes legal advice.
Mr Mandelson’s actions
For the purposes of this note, we are putting Mr Mandelson’s actions into nine categories:2
Personal emails: Mr Mandelson and Mr Epstein exchanged thousands of emails, the contents of which were mostly innocuous and personal (see here for an example).
Forwarding Government media notes: on many occasions, Government media personnel sent Mr Mandelson snippets from newspaper articles and other publications, which he forwarded to Mr Epstein (see here for an example).
Leaking of a draft strategy note: On 20 December 2009, Mr Mandelson sent Mr Epstein a draft of a strategy note he had composed for Gordon Brown; Mr Epstein subsequently suggested changes to it.
Assisting lobbying against bank bonus tax: From 15 December to 17 December 2009, Mr Mandelson assisted Epstein’s efforts to help JPM lobby against the Government’s proposed new bank bonus tax. This culminated in Mr Mandelson advising Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPM, to “mildly threaten” the Chancellor (which it seems he did).
Leaks of confidential Government information: In this category we would put the 13 June 2009 Nick Butler “saleable assets” email, the 2 August 2009 Vadera/Heywood email on financial markets and bank lending, the 9 May 2010 email tipping off Epstein that the Eurozone bailout was about to be concluded, and the 10 May 2010 email telling Epstein that Gordon Brown had resigned.
Assisting JPM’s lobbying of Larry Summers and leaking confidential US Government information. In late March 2010, Larry Summers was in London meeting with Government figures including the Chancellor and Mandelson. Mandelson acted as a conduit for Epstein and JPMorgan, arranging a meeting for them, and forwarding informal and formal notes of meetings between Summers and the Chancellor, and Summers and Mandelson himself.
An unknown amount of gifts in 2009 and 2010. In 2009, Mr Epstein agreed to make payments to Mr Mandelson’s then-partner to cover tuition fees for an osteopathy course. Epstein asked for the arrangements to be characterised as loans (so he could avoid US gift tax). The total amount is unknown, but is likely in the tens of thousands of pounds. Mr Mandelson responded to reports by claiming he thought the payments were bursaries from Mr Epstein’s charitable foundation – however the contemporary evidence suggests this is untrue, and he actually understood them to be gifts.
Finally, either insufficient disclosure or dishonesty when being considered for the role of US Ambassador. Keir Starmer said Peter Mandelson “lied” to him, “repeatedly“, and apologised for believing Mandelson’s “lies” when he was directly asked about his relationship with Epstein. Mr Starmer said “none of us knew the depth of, the darkness of that relationship“.
This chart shows the approximate count of Epstein emails per month that are with, or refer to, Peter Mandelson:3
You can explore the Mandelson emails in the Epstein files in more detail with our public search tool, which includes an interactive bar chart where you can explore emails on particular dates.
Evidence of dishonesty
There is evidence of dishonesty in Mr Mandelson’s recent responses to reports that he received gifts from Jeffrey Epstein.
The Epstein files contain three bank statements, from 2003 and 2004, showing three transfers of $25,000 to Peter Mandelson:
“Allegations which I believe to be false that he made financial payments to me 20 years ago, and of which I have no record or recollection, need investigating by me.”
We showed the documents to two individuals4 who worked for JPMorgan Private Bank in the early 2000s, and they told us that the documents appear to be authentic JPMorgan Private Bank bank statements. We expect a police investigation would be able to confirm this by obtaining records from the UK banks that received these payments. If the payments were in fact received then in our view Mr Mandelson’s (carefully worded) denial is not credible.
The Epstein files also contain multiple emails demonstrating that a series of payments were made to Mr Mandelson’s then-partner in 2009 and 2010, ostensibly to fund tuition fees for an osteopathy course (which was never completed).
Mr Mandelson responded to reports of these payments by telling The Times:
“Epstein told Reinaldo that he had an educational foundation which gave bursaries or scholarships and offered one for an osteopathy course. I saw this as kindness, nothing more. It was a great help to Reinaldo and I thanked him.
“n retrospect, it was clearly a lapse in our collective judgment for Reinaldo to accept this offer. At the time it was not a consequential decision/”
However there is no evidence to support this in the Epstein files. The offer to help came from Jeffrey Epstein alone, and all the discussions at the time were personal. There was no mention at any point of a foundation or a bursary.5 Mr Mandelson’s partner sent payment details to Epstein personally, and all discussions about amounts and mechanics were directly with Epstein. We expect Mr Mandelson would know that this is not how foundations operate (even small ones).
Epstein insisted (first to Mr Mandelson’s partner and then to Mr Mandelson) that the arrangement had to be documented as a loan to avoid US gift tax. We expect Mr Mandelson would know that no foundation would act in this way; bursaries are tax exempt.
We expect a prosecution would say this the apparent dishonesty of Mr Mandelson’s responses is relevant to Mr Mandelson’s state of mind at the time of the events in question. If Mr Mandelson truly believed he had done nothing wrong, he would not be trying to “cover-up” the gifts.
This focuses on the simple question of whether Mr Mandelson lied in the appointment process for his ambassadorship. It would be the most straightforward offence to charge, technically and (probably) practically.
A false representation. It is a question of fact whether Keir Starmer (or others in his team) asked Mr Mandelson about his relationship with Epstein, and whether Mr Mandelson gave a false response. Mr Starmer has said that Mr Mandelson was asked, and gave a false reply. Mr Mandelson has responded that he answered questions about his relationship with Epstein in the vetting process accurately. 7 Mr Starmer has suggested there is written evidence of this – if that’s correct then a conviction may be reasonably straightforward. If not, the question will be whether a jury believes Mr Starmer’s version of events “beyond reasonable doubt” (something that would be greatly assisted if there are additional witnesses supporting Mr Starmer’s view of events).
Dishonest. Mr Mandelson might say he misunderstood the question, or couldn’t remember the depth of his friendship with Mr Epstein. He might say his sole motivation was to avoid personal embarrassment. However if it is established that a false representation was made, we expect a prosecution would say that the gravity of events makes these explanations implausible. The judge would instruct the jury to apply the modern test of dishonesty: to first ascertain what the defendant actually knew or believed (subjective), and then decide if their conduct was honest by the standards of ordinary decent people (objective).
With the intention of making a gain. That seems relatively straightforward; if appointed as ambassador then he would expect to receive a respectable salary plus significant other benefits and perks. Mr Mandelson might again argue his sole motivation was to avoid personal embarrassment and not to secure the job. He could go further and say that, even if he intended to secure the job, the salary was (for him) so modest that it was not a motivation. We are unsure either defence could be put to a jury in that form. Even if obtaining the salary was not a primary objective, or even a material objective for him, it was an inevitable outcome of the appointment which, in turn, Mr Mandelson must have appreciated was the likely outcome of not disclosing his deep friendship with Epstein. Therefore our view is that Mr Mandelson could probably be said to have intended the gain.
We expect that a prosecution would seek to adduce the evidence discussed above that Mr Mandelson lied publicly about the gifts he received from Epstein. They would say this is evidence of a propensity to lie when Epstein-related facts are inconvenient. Evidence of “bad character” is not admissible unless the prosecution can show (amongst other things) it is important explanatory evidence.
Lying on a CV to obtain a job is a fairly straightforward application of section 2, and attempts to say that “everybody exaggerates on their CV” have not been successful. The maximum sentence is ten years’ imprisonment; there is also the prospect of a confiscation order for the earnings obtained by the false representation.
There is an additional offence in section 3 of the Fraud Act of fraud by failing to disclose information; however it only applies where a person is under a legal duty to disclose, and we are not aware of such a duty (although it’s possible the appointment process has legal elements of which we are unaware).
2. Misconduct in public office
Misconduct in public office8 is not found anywhere in the statute book – it’s a common law offence, created by judges over centuries9 (with its modern form dating from 1783). The offence was rarely prosecuted in the post-war period, but more recently has been increasingly used, often against prison officers who have had improperrelationshipswithprisoners.
The archaic and uncertain nature of the offence has been criticised by the Law Commission and others, and the offence may be abolished and replaced in this parliamentary session (but of course not with retrospective effect).
The Court of Appeal summarised the components of the offence as:
A public officer acting as such.
Wilfully neglects to perform his duty and/or wilfully misconducts himself.
To such a degree as to amount to an abuse of the public’s trust in the office holder.
Without reasonable excuse or justification.
The question is, therefore, whether forwarding Government emails to Mr Epstein, providing Mr Epstein with a summary of meetings, and advising Jamie Dimon to “mildly threaten” the Chancellor, satisfies these conditions.
We will consider each in turn.
A public officer acting as such
It is clear that a Minister is a “public officer”.10
A more difficult question is “acting as such”. The defendant must be acting in the discharge/exercise of their public functions, not merely misconducting themselves whilst holding office. As the CPS guidance says, on the basis of the case law, there must be a close nexus between the wilful neglect/breach of duty or wilful misconduct and the power, authority, responsibilities and/or duties vested in the suspect by virtue of their office. That is why the Boris Johnson private prosecution failed: the High Court held that statements made during a political campaign were not acts done “in the discharge of his duties” as Mayor and MP.
Looking at our categories of behaviour by Mr Mandelson:
Personal emails: Many people would say that it was improper for a Government Minister to exchange emails with a convicted sex offender, however we believe these emails fell outside the discharge of Mr Mandelson’s public duties, regardless of whether Mr Mandelson was in a Government building at the time, and/or sending the emails using a Government-issued device. The law does not require a formalistic determination of whether a person is physically “on duty“, but whether they are (in substance) acting as part of the exercise of their public functions. Here we would say Mr Mandelson was not.
Forwarding Government media notes: When Mr Mandelson received Government emails and forwarded them to Mr Epstein, we believe he was acting in the course of his public duty. If he wasn’t a Minister then he would not have received the emails. The “act” under scrutiny is not an unrelated private act but the handling (and onward disclosure) of official information encountered through office. The fact the media notes contained no confidential information does not change the answer (but is relevant to the “misconduct” limb considered below).
Leaking of a draft strategy note: Our view is that the strategy note was a political document and not a Government document. When Mr Mandelson forwarded the draft to Mr Epstein, he was acting in the course of his political role, but not in the course of his public duty as a Minister. Opinions may differ, and this point is certainly not beyond doubt.
Assisting lobbying against bank bonus tax: Mr Mandelson was using his own discussions with the Chancellor to lobby on behalf of Mr Epstein and Mr Staley, and then advising JPMorgan (through Mr Epstein) how to lobby directly. Liaising with business and representing its views to other Ministers is part of the role of the Business Secretary. Whether Mr Mandelson behaved properly is a separate question we will look at below, but the nature of the act means in our view he was acting as a public officer and not a private citizen.
Leaks of confidential Government information: Mr Mandelson was acting in the course of his public duty when he received confidential Government emails for the same reason discussed above in the context of media notes.
Assisting JPM’s lobbying of Larry Summers and leaking confidential US Government information. The lobbying activity was in the course of Mr Mandelson’s duty for the same reason as the bank bonus tax lobbying; the leaking was in the course of Mr Mandelson’s duty for the same reason as the media notes.
2003 and 2004 payments totally $75,000. The payments were received when Mr Mandelson was an MP, which is a “public office” for this purpose. However we currently do not know why the payments were made; we therefore have no basis for saying if they were received by Mr Mandelson in the course of acting in his public office.
2009 and 2010 payments to Mr Mandelson’s partner. These payments were received when Mr Mandelson was Business Secretary and a senior member of Cabinet. However, given that the payments were purely personal in nature, we don’t think they can be said to have been received in the course of Mr Mandelson’s public office.
insufficient disclosure or dishonesty when being considered for the role of US Ambassador. We don’t believe lying (if that is what happened) in the course of applying for public office is within the scope of the offence.
It is therefore our view that Mr Mandelson was acting as a public officer for four out of the nine categories of behaviour this article considers. The exceptions – the exchanges of personal emails and the strategy note – will not be discussed further in this article.
Wilful breach of duty or misconduct
This has two elements. There must be a breach of duty (or misconduct) and it must be wilful.
The Court of Appeal has held that the word “wilful” means that the prosecution must prove more than a failure to meet an objective standard. The breach must be deliberate or subjectively reckless, not merely inadvertent, stupid, mistaken, or careless.
Looking at the four remaining categories, we will first consider whether there was a duty:
Forwarding Government media notes: We don’t believe these notes contained any confidential information. So we are doubtful there was any duty on Mr Mandelson not to forward them. We will therefore not consider this category further.
Assisting lobbying against bank bonus tax: There is clearly no duty not to lobby against your own Government – such behaviour is commonplace. Mr Mandelson’s actions went further than that – he misused ministerial position for an improper purpose. That duty arises from the nature of public office: powers and access are conferred for public purposes, and using them to advance a private interest (or to act as a conduit for a private party’s lobbying strategy) can constitute a breach of duty.11
Leaks of confidential Government information: We believe it’s reasonably clear that a Minister has (i) a duty to safeguard confidential information obtained by virtue of office, and (ii) a duty not to misuse privileged access to internal policy/market-sensitive material for non-public purposes. That kind of duty is routinely treated as capable of underpinning misconduct in public office prosecutions in practice – see CPS guidance.
Assisting JPM’s lobbying of Larry Summers and leaking confidential US Government information: For the lobbying/conduit aspect, the same duty framing as the bank bonus tax point applies. For the leaking aspect, the duty point is again more straightforward: unauthorised onward transmission of confidential meeting notes / “formal notes” received by virtue of office fits the paradigm of safeguarding official information.
Then, for the three remaining categories, the question is whether any breach can be considered wilful.
Mr Mandelson’s acts were obviously intentional – that is not in doubt. The live issue for “wilful” is Mr Mandelson’s state of mind when lobbying/forwarding. It’s not enough to say Mr Mandelson should have known better, and/or was reckless. The question is whether he (i) knowingly breached a duty (or at least appreciated a risk that he was breaching one), or (ii) acted with reckless indifference (“not caring”) to that question and/or to the relevant risks.
Recklessness in this context means subjective recklessness i.e., the suspect was aware of a risk and in the circumstances known to them at the time it was unreasonable to take that risk.
In other words:
If Mr Mandelson genuinely believed – even mistakenly or stupidly – that (for example) sharing the Larry Summers meeting summaries with Epstein was part of his job or permitted, he cannot be guilty of this offence. As the Court of Appeal said, “a mistake, even a serious one, will not suffice”.
However if Mr Mandelson suspected it might be wrong but avoided checking the rules because they didn’t want to know the answer (wilful blindness), that would constitute subjective recklessness.
We expect a prosecution would say that any Cabinet Minister knows it is wrong to advise a foreign bank to threaten the Chancellor, or to share internal Government emails and meeting notes with third parties, particularly a third party who Mr Mandelson knew had been convicted of a serious criminal offence.
We concluded that accepting gifts from Mr Epstein did not give rise to a wrongful conduct in public office itself, because we don’t believe the gifts can be said to have been received in the course of Mr Mandelson’s public duties. However the gifts are relevant to the factual question of whether Mr Mandelson knew he was wrong to lobby and share the emails, or whether he was reckless in doing so. As we discuss above, Mr Mandelson’s recentstatements regarding the gifts are in our view not credible, and we expect a prosecution would say those statements are evidence that Mr Mandelson knew his relationship with Mr Epstein was wrong.
We foresee two potential responses to this from Mr Mandelson.
A possible response would be for Mr Mandelson to contend that he did not appreciate that Government emails or meeting notes of this kind were not meant to be shared with trusted third parties. The difficulty with that position is the selectivity of the disclosures. Only a relatively small subset of the material he received was forwarded, and it was material of a particular sensitivity and interest to the recipient. That pattern sits uneasily with an explanation based on general ignorance of the rules, and instead suggests a conscious judgment about what could and could not be shared. We expect a prosecution would also note the unusual choice of trusted recipient – a convicted sex offender. Ultimately, however, it would be a matter for the jury whether any claimed lack of awareness should be accepted.
Mr Mandelson might go further than professing ignorance. He could say something like: “I believed what I did was part of legitimate stakeholder engagement and was in the public interest”, particularly in relation to the discussions around the shape of US regulatory reform. This would be a more credible argument if Mr Mandelson forwarded Government emails to other finance figures, and not just Mr Epstein. We do not know if he did. But if Mr Epstein was the only recipient of such emails then it looks much more like a personal (and potentially corrupt) favour than as stakeholder engagement. A further difficulty with this argument is that stakeholder engagement (in our collective experience) never involves sharing internal Government meeting notes.
We again expect that a prosecution would seek to adduce the “bad character” evidence discussed above that Mr Mandelson lied publicly about the gifts he received from Epstein, and would say this is evidence of a propensity to lie when Epstein-related facts are inconvenient.
Abuse of the public trust
This has been held to involve “a high threshold, requiring an affront to the standing of the public office held, and conduct so far below acceptable standards as to amount to an abuse of the public’s trust in the office holder”.
Lord Justice Bean put it more memorably: “there is and should be no offence of ‘being so naughty that a jury thinks you should be sent to prison’”.
So whilst it has been suggested that the offence could be applied to Ministers taking up paid employment after leaving office, and using the benefit of their experience and contacts for that purpose, we think that is incorrect on the basis of the decided authorities. “Abuse of the public’s trust” is a high bar, and political and/or moral disapproval of a person’s actions does not reach it.
The abuse must be “serious“. For this reason, Keir Starmer, when Director of Public Prosecutions, decided not to prosecute a civil servant who had leaked confidential Home Office documents to a Conservative Party politician; Mr Starmer thought that the damage done by the leaks was insufficient to amount to a serious abuse of the public trust. Furthermore, the leaker’s stated purpose was political accountability; a jury might well see that as a proper purpose.
By contrast, the Court of Appeal held in R v Norman that a prison officer who had accepted payments of £10,000 from journalists over five years was conduct which the jury were entitled to conclude caused significant public harm, because it undermined public confidence in the prison service.12
We see the Mr Mandelson case as considerably more serious than R v Norman. We expect there would be a serious abuse of the public’s trust if a Cabinet Minister leaked Government documents to (say) Jamie Dimon. However when the recipient of the leaks is a convicted sex offender, the “seriousness” seems relatively easy to establish. We expect those in Government at the time would testify that they felt betrayed.
The abuse of trust in the Mandelson case is heightened by what is, at a minimum, a conflict of interest. Mr Mandelson was personally close to Mr Epstein, he and his partner received money from Mr Epstein, and ultimately Mr Epstein helped Mr Mandelson find lucrative employment and consultancy opportunities. There may have been no explicit quid pro quo, but we believe these facts are sufficient to put to a jury that Mr Mandelson had a conflict of interest.
We therefore expect that a jury is entitled to conclude that Mr Mandelson’s actions caused significant public harm; it damaged the integrity of Government decision-making, and undermined public confidence in politics and in government.
Without reasonable excuse or justification
We have already had a flavour of the defence Mr Mandelson might run. He defended his advice to JPMorgan to “mildly threaten” Alistair Darling by saying that his concerns about the bankers’ bonus tax reflected wider concern in the financial services industry:
Every UK and international bank was making the same argument about the impact on UK financial services… My conversations in government at the time reflected the views of the sector as a whole, not a single individual.
He could develop this further, and say that he believed he was acting in the UK’s best interests, because it was his view that proposed tax and regulatory changes were against those interests.
Whether that is credible would ultimately be something for a jury to decide. It is, however, our view that the contemporaneous evidence is not consistent with Mr Mandelson’s explanation – the correspondence with Mr Epstein does not refer to the UK’s interests, or show signs of considering the UK’s interests. It is one thing to seek to understand the views of the financial services sector, and advocate them in Government; quite another to advise a foreign bank to “mildly threaten” the Chancellor. Indeed the discussions with Mr Epstein don’t appear to consider the interests of the financial sector generally – they are focused around JPMorgan and its own commercial interests, via Mr Epstein’s close contact with Jes Staley:
There is a further, deeper, problem, to a defence framed as “I thought it was good policy to protect the financial sector”.
The fact that a particular end may be appropriate and even desirable does not make the means used to achieve that end automatically reasonable. If Mr Mandelson had been briefing a journalist then the means might be appropriate; in this case, showing the means were appropriate feels challenging.
Conclusion
Overall, we think a misconduct in public office prosecution would have a realistic prospect of conviction on the evidence presently available, principally because the alleged conduct involves selective disclosure of internal Government information to a private individual, alongside apparent use of ministerial access to facilitate private lobbying. The strongest points for the prosecution would be (i) the deliberate and selective nature of the leaks and interventions, (ii) the sensitivity of some of the information, and (iii) the potential conflicts of interest arising from Mr Mandelson’s relationship with Mr Epstein. The main uncertainties are inherent to the offence itself: the high and fact-sensitive threshold for “abuse of the public’s trust”, and the need to prove Mr Mandelson’s state of mind (whether he appreciated the impropriety, or was at least recklessly indifferent to it), rather than merely showing poor judgment. Those issues would ultimately turn on the surrounding evidence and the credibility of any explanation Mr Mandelson chose to give.
3. Insider dealing – the criminal offence
The insider dealing rules require more detailed consideration.
Mr Mandelson passed information to Mr Epstein which we would, in a commercial sense, describe as “market-sensitive”. This included the timing of Gordon Brown’s resignation, the €500bn Eurozone bailout, and early discussions around the shape of international financial services reform.
That potentially engages the insider dealing offences. In 2009 and 2010, these were contained in section 52 of the Criminal Justice Act 1993:13
At first sight it looks as if the “disclosure” offence in section 52(2)(b) may have been committed. However there are three serious barriers to a prosecution.
First, section 56 defines “inside information” to mean information relating to specific securities and issuers:
None of the information passed by Mr Mandelson related directly to specific securities. It might be argued that (for example) the information on the Eurozone bailout was particularly price sensitive for Eurozone government issuers, and they were therefore “particular issuers of securities”. That, however, feels insufficiently precise – particularly given the express exclusion for “issuers of securities generally”. We expect that “relates to” would be given a narrower meaning (although we are unaware of any authority on this point).
Second, section 56 requires that the information would, if made public, “be likely to have a significant effect on the price of any securities”. This is a question of fact, and one we have not investigated – however, City experts we have spoken to are doubtful that there would have been any significant effect, as the Eurozone bailout and Mr Brown’s resignation were both anticipated and therefore substantially “priced-in”.
Third, and most seriously, there is an absolute defence to the disclosure offence in section 53:
We expect Mr Mandelson would say he did not expect any person to deal in securities on the back of his leaks. On the basis of the evidence we have reviewed, this would be credible – we have seen no sign that Mr Epstein or anybody else intended to deal. Our belief, based on an extensive review of the Epstein files, is that Mr Epstein used the information as a currency in itself, to gain favour and credibility with his extensive contacts on Wall Street.
This third reason is likely to be fatal to any prosecution for insider dealing.
4. Insider dealing – civil offence
There is also a prohibition on insider dealing in the market abuse rules in section 118 of the Financial Services and Markets Act (FSMA). This is not a criminal offence; the consequences of breach are limited to regulatory sanctions and civil penalties.14
There is again a question as to whether the information provided by Mr Mandelson was specific enough to fall within the ambit of the rules. The prohibition on disclosure in section 118 applies only to information “of a precise nature” which (broadly speaking) would be likely to have a significant effect on the price of securities.
For the same reasons noted above in the context of insider dealing, we think it’s doubtful that Mr Mandelson’s disclosures were “precise” enough for section 118 to apply, and also doubtful whether the information would have had a significant effect on the price.
If, however, we are wrong on these two points, then applying market abuse penalties would be significantly easier than an insider dealing prosecution. Unlike the CJA 1993, there is no “motive” defence, and penalties are applied on the basis of the civil standard of proof (the balance of probabilities) and not the criminal standard (beyond reasonable doubt).
Where penalties can be applied, they are unlimited – the legislation provides for penalties of such amount as the Financial Conduct Authority “considers appropriate”.
The market abuse position is therefore not at all straightforward, but in our view would justify an investigation by the Financial Conduct Authority.
Sections 1 and 2 of the Act apply only to information relating to security or intelligence or defence; none of the emails identified to have been leaked by Mr Mandelson to Mr Epstein fall in this category (and Mr Mandelson’s role means his access to such information would have been relatively limited).
Section 3 applies to “damaging disclosures” of confidential information relating to, or obtained from, another State. The emails and meeting notes leaked by Mr Mandelson regarding discussions with Larry Summers are potentially within this provision. However, a disclosure is only “damaging” if it “endangers the interests of the United Kingdom abroad, seriously obstructs the promotion or protection by the United Kingdom of those interests or endangers the safety of British citizens abroad” (or is likely to do so). We don’t believe the evidence shows that the UK’s interests were endangered; Mr Mandelson’s actions merely gave commercial advantage to Mr Epstein and his contacts.15
Section 4 applies to (amongst other things) disclosures that result in the commission of an offence. The word “offence” is not defined, but we believe it likely encompasses matters that are a criminal offence in other jurisdictions. It is therefore conceptually possible that section 4 applies; say if Mr Mandelson’s leaks of market-sensitive matters were used for trading purposes, and that resulted in a criminal offence being committed (in the US or elsewhere). There is, however, no evidence that any such trading took place, or indeed that any other offences were committed as a result of Mr Mandelson’s leaks to Mr Epstein.
6. The Bribery Act
The Bribery Act only came into force from 1 July 2011 – after most of the events to which it could (even potentially) be applied.
We have spoken to people working in Government in 2009 and 2010 who describe Mr Mandelson’s actions as “treachery” or even “treason”. However as a legal matter, treason is a tightly defined offence, under a series of archaicstatutes. None of Mr Mandelson’s actions are covered by these offences.
As of today, the only evidence we have of Mr Mandelson’s actions are the PDF copies of Epstein’s emails, available from the US Department of Justice’s public “Epstein Library“. We do not know how the emails were obtained, what device or devices they were obtained from, or what processes were used to extract the emails from those devices and generate the PDFs. The PDFs have been redacted (automatically) and have lost the underlying “metadata” that the original emails contained, showing the electronic path that the emails took.
If there was a prosecution, then it may be that Mr Mandelson would accept the authenticity of the emails16 (he has not accepted or denied their authenticity to date). If, the other hand, Mr Mandelson did contest the authenticity, or merely put the prosecution to proof, then adducing the PDF documents as evidence would likely be challenging. We expect in practice the UK authorities would make an application under the UK/US mutual legal assistance treaty for the original native email files, and attestations of their authenticity. These applications are relatively commonplace, but can be refused by the US on public policy grounds.
Similar issues arise with the US bank statements evidencing Mr Epstein’s 2003 and 2004 payments to Mr Mandelson, although in principle the police should be able to obtain the records from the UK banks that received the payments.
A discussion of the rules of evidence is outside the scope of this article; we assume in the analysis above that the original files would be obtained.
Many thanks to T, F, B and G for contributing their expertise to this article, thanks to W and S for writing the first draft, and to MG and S for reviewing near-final drafts.
There are other offences which we didn’t consider would be at all relevant and are not covered. For example: section 4 of the Fraud Act 2006 creates an offence of “fraud by abuse of position”, but it only applies if a person “occupies a position in which he is expected to safeguard, or not to act against, the financial interests of another person”. We believe this doesn’t apply to roles (like a Minister’s) where a person is acting in the financial interests of the public generally. We also considered tax evasion offences: but it is unlikely the payments to Mr Mandelson were taxable, and so these offences are inapplicable. ↩︎
We are excluding from this list the discussion in April 2010 between Mr Mandelson and Jes Staley regarding JPMorgan’s purchase of the Sempra commodities business from the (now) Government-controlled Royal Bank of Scotland Group. It is referred to obliquely and it is unclear what role, if any, Mr Mandelson had. The fact others describe him as “helpful” suggests that further inquiry is warranted, but for now we have insufficient information to consider the implications. ↩︎
The chart counts emails where a “fuzzy” search finds the word “mandelson”, or an exact search finds “petie”, “reinaldo”, “avila da silva”, or “global counsel”. We infer dates from the PDFs; this is not completely reliable. This is intentionally narrower than the categories of emails indexed by our search tool, as we are trying on this page to demonstrate the flow of the relationship; the search tool aims to provide a comprehensive index of Mandelson-related emails. A consequence of this is that the chart on the search tool page is different from the chart below. ↩︎
Of course the two individuals have no personal knowledge of any of the events in question. ↩︎
Mr Epstein had a charitable foundation, but there is no evidence it was ever discussed with Mr Mandelson or his partner, and no evidence it ever made bursaries to individuals. ↩︎
This section was not included in the original version of this article; that omission was kindly pointed out by commentators on social media. ↩︎
Note that if Mr Mandelson is hoping to hide behind a clever form of words in his written answers then he may be disappointed – a “false representation” under the Act can be express or implied (as was the old position under the Theft Act, following R v Silverman). If Mr Mandelson completed a vetting form (as is standard for ambassadorial roles) and left a relevant section blank, or used a form of wording that was accurate on its face, but misleading in substance, then that may be a “false representation” for the purposes of section 2. ↩︎
Note that there have been some references to “misfeasance in public office”. That is a separate legal concept: a “tort” under which a civil claim can be made from someone harmed by an abuse of power by a public official. It seems doubtful anyone is in a position to bring such a claim against Mr Mandelson, but in any event it is outside the scope of this article. ↩︎
The authority for this proposition is sometimes said to be R v Friar (1819) 1 Chit Rep (KB) 702 – however the case itself does not seem to support this. The point is, however, generally accepted – see paragraph 2.74 of the Law Commission report, and the CPS prosecution guidance. Both parties seemed to accept that a mayor and an MP were “public officers”, in the High Court’s quashing of the attempted private prosecution of Boris Johnson for misconduct. ↩︎
See CPS guidance emphasising a “close nexus” between the misconduct and the responsibilities of office. A helpful comparator (albeit in a different factual setting) is the long line of “sale of office / selling information” cases, where the breach is not “contrary to employer policy” but the misuse of entrusted access and authority for a non-public purpose. See CPS discussion of disclosure/sale of confidential information by public servants, and the Court of Appeal’s discussion in the “journalist and police information” context: R v France). ↩︎
Both Norman and Galley/Green involved journalism and therefore consideration had to be given to the public interest and the ECHR protected freedom of expression. No such consideration is required in Mr Mandelson’s case. See also R v France. There is an excellent article on these cases by Martin Hicks QC and Christopher Ware. ↩︎
The Market Abuse Directive (MAD) required Member States to impose effective, proportionate and dissuasive sanctions, but did not (and could not) create criminal offences directly. ↩︎
There are also prohibitions in the Market Abuse Regulation, but those post-date Mandelson’s actions. ↩︎
The UK’s interests abroad might have been “endangered” (etc) had the US been aware that the UK’s discussions with Mr Summers were being leaked, however in the event this did not happen. ↩︎
It may be more difficult for him to credibly run a defence if he does not do so; given a tactical choice between asking the jury to decide if the emails are authentic, and asking the jury to decide if he has a defence, Mr Mandelson may prefer the latter. ↩︎
The official US Department of Justice “Epstein Library” search facility is slow and cumbersome. We can’t duplicate a multimillion-document search on our website, but we have made a fast and efficient search for the approximately 7,500 documents that are related to Peter Mandelson.1 It’s much less complete than jmail, but has the advantage that it gives you the original PDF, not the machine-read text (which can be unreliable/incomplete).
The bar chart below shows the dates of all the emails we’ve indexed.2 You can hover over the chart (or touch on mobile) and see the dates/subjects of individual emails, then click to view that email.
These 7,500 documents match a fuzzy search for “Mandelson”, or literal searches for “Petie”, “Reinaldo”, “Avila da Silva”, or “Global Counsel” ↩︎
Note that the PDFs contain no metadata, and so we infer dates from the text of the emails; this is far from being completely reliable. Many of the later email hits are false positives, i.e. not relating to Mandelson – we tried to err on the side of completeness. ↩︎
Multiple documents in the Epstein files show Peter Mandelson forwarding confidential Government emails to Jeffrey Epstein in 2009 and 2010.
The leaked material concerned live policy issues of immediate financial interest to Epstein and his circle. This report contains the full text of the most significant known leaked emails, together with a short explanation of the context and value of the emails.
This was all during the same period that Mandelson (via Epstein) advised Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan to “mildly threaten” the Chancellor to reverse a proposed tax on bank bonuses.
The leaks and the assistance to JPM were followed within months by highly valuable job offers from the very sector that benefited from that intelligence – job offers that Epstein procured and assisted with. And those job offers were so lucrative that Mandelson rejected an offer of $3-5m/year.
This article was updated as the story developed. Final update: 8 February 2026.See our separate analysis on the prospects of prosecuting Peter Mandelson.
In August 2009 the UK economy was still deep in the aftermath of the 2007–08 financial crisis, with the banking sector severely weakened and credit markets badly disrupted. Bank lending to businesses had collapsed: in the six months to February 2009, net lending by UK and foreign banks to UK businesses fell from £53.5 billion to just £8.6 billion. Small and medium-sized enterprises were hit hardest. It’s the reduction in lending that caused a financial crisis to become a crisis for the rest of the economy.
Jeffrey Epstein exchanged hundreds and possibly thousands of emails with Peter Mandelson. In June 2009 he told his girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, that Mr Mandelson was “for all intents and purposes” deputy prime minister:
(Epstein referred to “Petie” frequently when talking about Peter Mandelson to others, and sometimes when corresponding with Mr Mandelson.)
That relationship later paid off.
The August 2009 leak
Shriti Vadera was a Minister of State1 who played a key role in the UK’s response to the financial crisis. On 2 August 2009, she wrote a memo (in her characteristic capital letters) with proposals for pushing the banks to increase their lending. Ms Vadera sent it to other advisers in Number 10, plus Jeremy Heywood (the Prime Minister’s Principal Private Secretary) and Peter Mandelson (at the time a senior Cabinet Minister and Business Secretary).
Jeremy Heywood replied, talking about the importance of the non-bank lending market and securitisation.
This was a confidential discussion, which would have been of keen interest to Wall Street.
Four seconds after receiving Mr Heywood’s email, somebody forwarded it to Jeffrey Epstein (whose email address was [email protected]):
The sender’s name is redacted. It could have been any of the recipients, or someone they forwarded the email to. Whilst Peter Mandelson was one of the recipients of the original email from Ms Vadera, his name doesn’t appear on Jeremy Heywood’s reply – but he could have been bcc’d, or the recipient list may be incomplete or have been silently redacted or deleted.
The June 2009 leak
A few months earlier, Nick Butler, a special adviser to Gordon Brown, had sent an email to the Prime Minister with proposals for increasing private sector investment and improving Government finances. He suggested that, instead of focusing on spending cuts and tax rises, the Government should consider disposing of £20bn of “saleable assets” that didn’t need to be in the public sector.
The email was sent to Ms Vadera, Christina Scott (Private Secretary to the Prime Minister) and Peter Mandelson.
Mr Mandelson forwarded it straight to Jeffrey Epstein:
Epstein responded two hours later asking what “saleable assets” Mr Butler was referring to. Mr Mandelson responded that he thought it meant land and property.
It seems likely that Mr Mandelson was also the source of the August leak:
At the top of both email chains, the sender’s name has been redacted. In the August email this leaves the leaker unidentified. In the June email, Mr Mandelson’s name appears later in the chain. A key piece of information: the redacted sender line at the top of both emails is the same length, which is consistent with both emails having been sent by the same person.
One small but telling detail is the time shown on the emails. In summer 2009, the UK was on British Summer Time, one hour ahead of GMT. The internal Government emails in these chains are correctly timestamped one hour ahead. But the messages forwarded to Jeffrey Epstein are timestamped at GMT, not British Summer Time.2 That doesn’t mean the sender was abroad. Rather, it suggests the emails were sent from a personal email account or device set to GMT, not directly from a Government email system. In other words, these look like deliberate forwards from a personal inbox, not accidental leaks from an official one. Either both leaks were sent by the same person (Mr Mandelson), or Mr Mandelson and one other person independently used a personal email account or device configured to GMT. The former is plainly the simpler explanation.
Also consistent (but of course not probative), both leaks were sent by someone who used a BlackBerry and hadn’t turned off the default signature.
The fact the email from Mr Heywood was forwarded only four seconds later suggests that one of the direct recipients forwarded it. We rather expect Mr Mandelson was one of the recipients (it would be standard Government practice to “reply all”) and that his name has been omitted, redacted or deleted. However if that is wrong, and Mr Mandelson was not a direct recipient then he is surely in the clear; this is something Number 10 should be able to check.
The Epstein files contain extensive correspondence between Mr Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein. There is no evidence that we are aware of that any of the other recipients on the August email chain (Shriti Vadera, Jeremy Heywood, John Pond) were in contact with Epstein.
The question can be speedily resolved by obtaining the unredacted email from the US Department of Justice.
It was four months after this that Mr Mandelson worked against his own Government, advising JPMorgan (via Epstein) to “mildly threaten” the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
The 2010 leaks
Mr Mandelson continued to share other confidential information with Jeffrey Epstein throughout 2010. It’s pretty amusing to see Jes Staley congratulate Epstein on predicting the actions of the British Government, when the same thread shows exactly how Epstein could make such accurate predictions:
It looks highly improper for a serving Cabinet minister to be “helpful” (in whatever way) to a specific private transaction involving a major bank, via an intermediary like Epstein.
US financial reform
On 28 March 2010, Jeffrey Epstein asked Mandelson to lobby Larry Summers3, President Obama’s chief economic adviser. He wanted him to ask Mr Summers to meet with Jes Staley of JPMorgan to discuss the proposed Volcker rule (which would, broadly speaking, prevent banks taking trading positions). Epstein said that he (Epstein) couldn’t do this directly.
Mr Mandelson wasn’t feeling well, but when he recovered the next morning, his response was to ask Staley to produce a briefing note.
Epstein asked Staley to do this, and to “craft an argument why Volcker is bad for Europe”:
Staley prepared that note, and Epstein forwarded it to Mr Mandelson.
(These emails were found by Jim Pickard of the Financial Times.)
Three days later, 31 March 2010, the Chancellor of the Exchequer met Larry Summers, and Mandelson sent Epstein a short summary of the meeting straight afterwards.
(Thanks again to Sophie)
Mr Mandelson’s principal private secretary subsequently sent him a formal note of the meeting.4 It contained high level details of the new banking regulation and taxation that Mr Summers and the US Administration were seeking to enact, and some discussion of how the US should engage with France and Germany. Mr Mandelson forwarded the note to Jeffrey Epstein five minutes after receiving it.5
Epstein responded with suggestions as to how hedge funds should be taxed, and then detailed questions about the drafting of the new US rules (“may” vs “shall). Mr Mandelson was meeting Larry Summers for breakfast the next morning – there is a possible implication that Mr Mandelson would discuss the questions with him (but that is not clear, and there’s nothing on the point in the subsequent notes).
The next day, 1 April 2010, Mr Mandelson had that meeting with Larry Summers. Mr Summers shared some fairly candid views on the likely form any new banking regulation would take. At 1.22pm, Mr Mandelson’s private secretary sent a note of the meeting to Mr Mandelson. Within two minutes, Mr Mandelson forwarded it to Jeffrey Epstein:
(These emails were found by Gary Gibbon and the Channel 4 News team).
The €500bn Eurozone bailout
On 9 May 2010,6 Mr Mandelson wrote to Epstein confirming market rumours of the €500bn bailout of the Eurozone. Mr Mandelson said the bailout would be announced that night, and it was:
A few days later, Mr Mandelson gave Epstein advance notice of Gordon Brown’s resignation.
We can be reasonably confident7 that Mr Mandelson’s first email was sent at 10.07am on 10 May 2010. Gordon Brown’s resignation wasn’t public until about 7.19pm that evening.
This email was found by Gabriel Pogrund of the Sunday Times.
How did Epstein view Mandelson?
We perhaps get a clue from this exchange. Epstein and businessman/lawyer David Stern talk about Mandelson as if he’s on retainer:
The context was Terra Firma’s troubled private equity acquisition of EMI, which all-but destroyed the historic music group. Citi had financed the acquisition, and were about to enforce and acquire EMI from Terra Firma.8
Jeffrey Epstein casually suggests Mr Mandelson could help; David Stern responds that in his view it’s too early. There is no surprise or confusion at the way the serving Business Secretary is name-dropped into the discussion. That suggests that both Epstein and Stern viewed Mandelson as someone whose political influence and contacts could be deployed if and when it became useful.
Two weeks later, Epstein did reach out to Mr Mandelson. It’s unclear whether they spoke.9
And here, the Epstein-Mandelson relationship looks like the relationship of a client to their lobbyist, with Epstein asking Mandelson to set up a meeting between Larry Summers and Jes Staley:
Was there a quid pro quo?
The payments
We know that in 2003 and 2004, Mr Epstein wired a total of $75,000 to Mr Mandelson:
We don’t know what the payments were for, or if there were others. Mr Mandelson says he can’t recall the payments, but hasn’t clearly denied receiving them. The bank statements look genuine.
A month before the first payment, Ghisliane Maxwell sent Mr Mandelson an email which might have included a request for his bank account number (it says she wants to discuss the “act. for the money”):
This was of course years before the email leaks. However at around the same time as the leaks, Mr Mandelson’s then-partner was receiving payments from Jeffrey Epstein to fund his osteopathy course:
Mr Mandelson has claimed he thought it was a bursary from Epstein’s foundation. There is no evidence of this in the emails. It appears to have been an entirely personal arrangement, and the evidence suggests Mr Mandelson knew that at the time:
The job opportunities
Far more lucrative than the cash payments was Jeffrey Epstein’s help in obtaining a high-paying job.
The email in the Epstein files suggest that Mandelson had a particularly close interest in JPM, speaking to Jes Staley both directly and via Epstein (but of course we only see the emails to/from Epstein). Mandelson also looked for commercial opportunities for JPM – for example forwarding an email he’d received inviting him to a business forum in Shanghai:
And here we see Mandelson, a serving Cabinet minister, endorsing JPM involvement in a friend’s commercial listing:
Soon after the 6 May 2010 election, when Gordon Brown was still Prime Minister, Staley told Mandelson that supporting Mr Brown would be “bad form commercially”. We take that to mean “would be bad for your future job prospects”:
Then, two days after the change of Government in 2010, Epstein wrote to Jes Staley – it appears they were discussing a potential Deutsche Bank job for Peter Mandelson:
That appeared to pay off in June, with Deutsche offering Mr Mandelson $4-10m/year. The CEO’s stated reason for the hire was to “be able to access governments, families and corporations”:
But in July, Mr Mandelson was still looking:
And he thought he could do better than Deutsche Bank’s $3-5m:
And some unknown “DB revelation” intervened:
And here he is approaching Glencore (a letter we’d suggest is not very well written or persuasive; Epstein was much better at this):
They’re talking about advisory roles for a reason. Ministerial rules required that ministers must seek advice from the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACoBA) about any appointment/employment they wanted to take up within two years of leaving office. So Mr Mandelson had to obtain permission for most jobs (which might well not be forthcoming) – but advisory roles were technically out of scope of the rules in force at the time.10
Mr Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein were fully aware of the ACoBA restriction. This email shows Epstein telling Mr Mandelson he was “working around your restriction” (here they appear to be discussing a role advising BP on the fallout from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill).
By August Mandelson and Epstein seem to be just throwing ideas at each other – first discussing Blackstone:
And then Barrick, the gold and copper mining company:
At some point Mandelson decides he doesn’t want a full-time job, because he wants to build his own “Global Counsel” business. He wants a one-day-a-week job that still pays millions. That ends up being with Lazard, the financial adviser and asset manager.
At the start of the engagement with Lazard, Mandelson doesn’t seem to know anything about them – he asks what Epstein thinks of the firm. He relies on Epstein throughout the process, asking for advice on whether to tell JPM he’s speaking to Lazard, and even what to say when he meets the Lazard CEO:
It was announced in January 2010 that Peter Mandelson was becoming a senior adviser to Lazard. Pressreports at the time speculated he could be earning “as much as $1m per year”. The Lazard role was one day per week; Deutsche Bank was full time – but the emails above suggest his actual earnings likely exceeded that figure.
After the two year ACoBA period ended, he was appointed Chairman of the international arm. As ACoBA Chair has said, the rules are “next to useless”.11
Mandelson kept looking for more opportunities, with Epstein’s help. Here he is in 2011, asking whether he should try to get on Facebook’s board:
And naturally Mandelson sought Epstein’s advice at the very earliest stage of establishing his consultancy, Global Counsel:
The cover-up
In 2011, reports started to appear that Mandelson had been meeting Epstein. The Telegraph picked up a Florida court application that Epstein had made to leave his house arrest, in order to meet a senior British Minister in New York:
Mandelson had tried to meet Epstein, but had to cancel, saying “NYC… here I don’t come”:12
When the Telegraph story broke, Epstein and Mandelson seem to have liaised to get their story straight – they hadn’t in fact met:
The co-founder of Global Counsel, now its CEO, prepared a statement denying the meeting, and suggesting that Mandelson barely knew Epstein. He then checked this statement with Epstein himself:
That was a highly deceptive statement; we view it as part of a cover-up.
We believe the evidence shows that Jeffrey Epstein was pivotal to the creation and development of Global Counsel. There is much more on this in CityAM and the Financial Times.
The complete picture
Peter Mandelson wasn’t bribed by Jeffrey Epstein, and certainly wasn’t blackmailed by him. We believe the evidence suggests that Mr Mandelson provided intelligence and lobbying because he thought it was in his own commercial interest. He was correct. The payback was far greater than $10,000 of osteopathy tuition fees – it was Mr Mandelson’s subsequent highly lucrative career, and the (even more lucrative) creation of Global Counsel. All of which was enabled and assisted by Jeffrey Epstein and his network of contacts.
As Mr Mandelson said to Epstein, “it’s about reputation and perception”:
Thanks to K for additional research.
Footnotes
Sitting in both the Department of Business and the Cabinet Office, and in practice often an adviser to Gordon Brown. ↩︎
i.e. both messages (June and August) show the forward/reply header times in +0000 even though the UK was on BST (+0100) on both dates; meanwhile the embedded No 10/UK participants’ messages correctly show +0100. ↩︎
Summers had his own connection to Epstein which, whilst highly unsavoury, doesn’t appear to have involved leaking documents. ↩︎
The Chancellor thanked Mr Mandelson for his “intelligence ahead of the meeting” – query if that “intelligence” was the Staley talking points. ↩︎
The email from the PPS was sent at 1.38pm British Summer Time – the time offset is visible in the header. We know that Epstein’s emails are on New York time (GMT -4), because one of his emails has the time offset visible in the header. Mandelson’s emails don’t have a stated time offset, but the given times of the exchanges between him and Epstein only make sense if the email times are from the same time zone. That could be because Mandelson was in New York, but more likely it’s because Epstein’s gmail account was automatically translating the emails into Epstein’s time zone. ↩︎
This was after the 2010 General Election but the day before Gordon Brown resigned. ↩︎
Because the email at the top of the page has a timestamp showing that (as noted above) Peter Mandelson’s blackberry is operating on British Standard Time, without an adjustment for daylight savings time. ↩︎
Disclosure: our founder, Dan Neidle, advised Citi on its enforcement/acquisition. ↩︎
Epstein and failed to arrange a deal to help out Stern/Terra Firma. He tried to bring in his friend, Tommy Mottola (former head of Sony), and unknown other parties – but it seems they thought (correctly) it was easier to do a deal once Terra Firma were out of the picture. ↩︎
On 9 December 2009, Chancellor Alistair Darling unveiled a one-off 50% tax on bankers’ bonuses. New documents from the Epstein Files reveal that a serving cabinet minister privately advised JPMorgan on how to fight back. Peter Mandelson, then Business Secretary, counselled Jamie Dimon on how to threaten the Government into softening the tax. Those exchanges were channelled through Jeffrey Epstein.
On 15 December, Mr Epstein asked Mr Mandelson if the bank payroll tax could be amended so it applied only to cash bonuses (not the, much more valuable, non-cash elements such as share options). Mr Mandelson replied that he’d explained to Jes Staley (then a senior JPM executive, with close links to Epstein) that he was trying hard to amend the tax. Mr Epstein said Mr Mandelson should let Epstein know of any result before Mr Mandelson spoke to Mr Staley:
On 17 December 2009, Mr Epstein asked Mr Mandelson if Jamie Dimon should call the Chancellor one more time.1 Mr Mandelson responded that Jamie Dimon should “mildly threaten” Alistair Darling (presumably threatening to pull business/personnel out of the UK):
It looks like Mr Mandelson then spoke to Jamie Dimon directly:
Jamie Dimon appears to have followed up on the “mildly threaten” suggestion. In his autobiography, Alistair Darling describes Mr Dimon’s mood as “angry, very angry” and says he threatened to reduce JPMorgan’s gilt holdings and would reconsider their plans to build a new headquarters in London.2 Faisal Islam, the BBC’s economics editor, has written more about that call, and the light the Epstein emails shed on it.
After Labour lost power in 2010, Mr Mandelson founded lobbying/consultancy firm Global Counsel. Subsequent email exchanges with Mr Epstein (and a phone call on Christmas Day) appear to show Mr Mandelson positioning for work and perhaps even a position with JPM (with Mr Epstein playing down his chances):
Mr Mandelson said: “My aim is to acquire enough knowledge and networks in time to participate in real deals. I do not want to live by salary alone. That’s why I need to do as much as possible to build with JPM”.
Mr Mandelson’s response
Mr Mandelson told the FT:
Every UK and international bank was making the same argument about the impact on UK financial services. My conversations in government at the time reflected the views of the sector as a whole not a single individual.
This doesn’t explain Mr Mandelson’s actions. It’s quite extraordinary for a serving Government minister to advise a foreign bank to threaten the Chancellor in order to reduce its UK tax bill.
Mr Dimon’s reported comment that JPM’s bill would be over the total revenue the tax was expected to raise reveals the problem with the tax. The intention was to reduce bonuses as well as raise money – £550m was the projected figure. That kind of dual purpose is often problematic – the need for revenue ends up undermining the quasi-regulatory purpose. So whilst the Government expected it would incentivise banks to reduce bonuses, JPM’s response illustrates what actually happened: competitive pressure (from banks in other countries, and non-banks in the UK) meant that bonuses did not reduce much at all. The tax therefore raised significantly more than anticipated – £2.3bn. Our view is that this was a badly designed tax – its short timescale was distortive and unfair, and it failed to achieve its stated policy aims. A financial activities tax would have been more rational and, probably, more effective. ↩︎
Previously unreported emails – first identified by Tax Policy Associates – show Peter Mandelson discussing with his “chief life adviser”, Jeffrey Epstein, a tax avoidance structure for the purchase of a £2m1 Rio apartment, involving a Panama company.
Mr Mandelson told us that he has no recollection of the proposal, or knowledge as to the authenticity of the documents. He added that neither he nor his husband have ever owned property in Brazil, and that he has no association with any company in Panama, and holds no funds offshore.
After receiving that response, we identified a company, incorporated in Rio de Janeiro for the purpose of holding real estate, of which Mr Mandelson and his husband were the directors. Mr Mandelson has denied to us that he held Brazilian property through the company.
The emails
The email chain starts in October 2010, with Peter Mandelson deciding to buy an apartment in Rio, and sending emails asking for advice from his “chief life adviser”, Jeffrey Epstein:
About three weeks later, the documents show Mr Mandelson receiving approval from HSBC Private Bank for a loan of £1.68m to acquire the Rio apartment, secured on Mr Mandelson’s £2.4m London home.
Things progressed slowly, which is not unusual in Brazilian property transactions. In March 2011, Mr Mandelson wrote to Mr Epstein describing a highly unusual tax structure:
The email appears to be cut-off at the bottom, and we’ve been unable to locate anything further on this matter in the Epstein files.
“Reinaldo” was Mr Mandelson’s then partner, now husband, Reinaldo Avila da Silva.
What was the proposal?
The proposed structure was:
Incorporate a Brazilian company (Sociedade Limitada.2
The owners would be Mr Mandelson and Mr Avila da Silva, plus a newly incorporated Panama company, owned by Mr Mandelson.
Mr Mandelson would pay for his shares in the Brazilian company with US$50,000, which might also have facilitated a residence permit.
The Panama company would lend money from its London account to the Brazilian company.
The email doesn’t state how the Panama company obtains its money; presumably it was to be from Mr Mandelson, funded in part from the loan from HSBC Private Bank. There is no evidence HSBC was aware of the Panama structure.
In our view, and that of the Brazilian advisers we spoke to, the arrangement looks like a highly artificial tax avoidance scheme. The effect of the structure was to hide the true nature of the arrangement – a gift from Mr Mandelson to Mr Avila da Silva. The Brazilian advisers believed the Brazilian tax authorities would have challenged the structure, if they had become aware of it.
It’s important to stress that Mr Mandelson has denied that he implemented the structure, and indeed said he cannot recall it (but see below).
What was the purpose of the structure?
The stated concern in the email was potential tax exposure in both Brazil and the UK.
There has never been a UK tax on buying foreign property. There is UK tax if a UK resident sells foreign property, or receives foreign rental income, and UK inheritance tax applies to foreign property. But whilst the Panama structure might disguise the income/gains, it likely wouldn’t prevent it being technically taxed in the UK.
Two Brazilian taxes are mentioned. If Mr Mandelson and Mr Avila da Silva bought the property jointly, then this would probably be treated as a gift to Mr Avila da Silva, subject to the 4% Rio de Janeiro state tax on gifts and inheritances (Imposto sobre Transmissão Causa Mortis e Doação).3 The proposed arrangement meant that there was still a gift in substance (as Mr Avila da Silva would own shares in the company holding the apartment) but it was disguised as a commercial loan.
The Brazilian advisers we spoke to couldn’t identify what the 6% tax in the email was referring to. 4 It’s possible this was a miscommunication and referring to a different issue.
It is quite possible that Mr Mandelson was misdescribing, oversimplifying, or misunderstanding the precise tax issues he was concerned about. Brazilian tax is notoriously complex, and the email was Mr Mandelson’s own summary of what sounds like a preliminary discussion with a Brazilian adviser. We would therefore caution against reading the tax content too literally.
What matters, however, is not whether the analysis was correct, but what the proposed response was. Mr Mandelson appeared very comfortable with using an artificial Panama structure to avoid tax in Brazil and, possibly, the UK.
Mr Mandelson’s response
We wrote to Mr Mandelson asking for comment:
After this exchange, we identified a company incorporated in Rio de Janeiro in May 2011 for the purpose of purchasing and selling real estate. Its shareholders were Mr Mandelson and Mr Avila da Silva. The company was liquidated in April 2014:5
We asked Mr Mandelson. He denied owning Brazilian real estate through the company:
We subsequently located the notarised incorporation documents, which include Mr Mandelson’s signature:
At this point we don’t know what the Brazilian company actually did, and whether it held any property. However the company records are inconsistent with the Panama structure described in the email (because the Brazilian company doesn’t have a Panama company as a shareholder).
There are probably three possibilities.
The emails are fake, created by an unknown third party, Jeffrey Epstein, or someone in the Epstein investigation. The company is either fake or unrelated. This seems very unlikely given the notarised incorporation documents.
The emails are authentic, but the Rio purchase never progressed, and the company was incorporated but never used. It is, however, surprising that Mr Mandelson cannot recall that he came close to spending £2m on an apartment in Rio.
The emails are authentic, the Rio purchase happened, but the Panama structure was not used.
Many thanks to B and P for providing, at very short notice, their Brazilian tax insight and expertise. Amazing work from G finding the Brazilian company, and from J and L locating the incorporation document.
Footnotes
Successive drafts of this report had currency errors, for which our apologies. ↩︎
The alternative type of corporate entity, a Sociedade Anônima (S.A.), is unlikely – it’s usually only used by large businesses. In 2011, Brazilian law strictly required a Sociedade Limitada) to have at least two owners (the Brazilian term sócios translates to “partners” but this was not a partnership). See page 230 of this law review. ↩︎
The tax applied to cash gifts to a person domiciled in Rio. Mr Avila da Silva is Brazilian; presumably there was a concern at the time that, despite living in the UK, he was Brazilian domiciled, or alternatively that the situs of the assets brought the gift within the scope of ITCMD. ↩︎
There was a 6% tax on tax on financial operations (Imposto sobre Operações Financeiras) which applied to cross-border foreign currency loans, but it’s not obvious why there would have been such a loan in a vanilla structure where Mr Mandelson and Mr Avila da Silva acquired the property directly. On the other hand, the tax would appear apply to the proposed structure, which might be one reason why it didn’t proceed. ↩︎
You can find the official Receita Federal CNPJ certificate by searching in the Brazilian company registry for company reference 13.685.505/0001-89. The certificate confirms registration and status only; details such as partners’ names come from separate public filings with the state commercial registry (JUCERJA), which commercial databases aggregate and republish. ↩︎
The Renters’ Rights Act unintentionally turns hundreds of thousands of ordinary residential tenancies into an annual stamp duty reporting obligation, often for tax bills of only a few pounds. Financial Times report here.
The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 contains a fundamental reform: from May 2026, most residential tenancies in England will continue indefinitely – fixed term tenancies are abolished. That has an overlooked consequence: an ordinary tenancy that keeps running requires a stamp duty calculation every year, and if the tenancy lasts long enough, stamp duty will eventually become due.
If nothing changes, we estimate that, in the next three years, 150,000 households in private rental accommodation will enter this annual regime. They will then have to pay and file every year for the rest of their tenancy.
Many more will become liable to pay and file in the years that follow:
The amounts of tax will in most cases be very small, but calculating and filing the tax – and doing so every year – is something we believe most people won’t anticipate (and will find highly inconvenient). There’s an automatic fixed penalty of £100 for late filing, and £200 for filing after three months.1
Worst still, it’s possible that some tenants could have a stamp duty filing obligation very soon after the Renters’ Rights Act starts applying, on 1 May 2026.
These seem like anomalous results, which we don’t believe the Government intended. We suggest below how the law could be changed.
The new rules
Most people renting property in England have historically signed an “assured shorthold” tenancy, typically for twelve months. If they and the landlord wish to continue the arrangement then a new twelve month tenancy is signed before the old one expires.
(The Act does not apply to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland; housing is devolved – so the issue discussed in this report is relevant only to England).
The impact of stamp duty
Most people are familiar with stamp duty2 applying to the purchase of freeholds and long leases (such as when someone buys a flat, typically with a large up-front payment and then a small ongoing rent). In cases like that, where a large sum is payable up-front, stamp duty then applies on that sum at rates escalating from 0% to 12% (or more in some cases).
However, stamp duty can apply to short term tenancies too.
The basic rule is that stamp duty is charged on all leases3 (including most residential tenancies, regardless of term) at 1% of the net present value (NPV) of the rent, to the extent the NPV of future rental payments exceeds £125,000.
The “net present value” of a stream of payments is (broadly speaking) a measure of how much it would cost to buy that stream of payments today. So if, for example, I promise to pay you £1,000 in a year’s time, the net present value of that promise is a little under £1,000, because you have to wait a year for the payment. The rate we reduce it by is the “discount rate“. In economic terms, the appropriate discount rate will vary depending on the circumstances, but for SDLT purposes it is fixed by statute at 3.5%.
Right now, this is only rarely relevant to residential tenancies.
In much of the private rented sector – particularly for higher-value or agent-managed lettings – fixed-term tenancies were commonly renewed under a new tenancy, rather than being allowed to roll into a statutory periodic tenancy. For stamp duty purposes, this mattered: each new tenancy was treated as a separate lease4, and a one-year tenancy would have to have a very high rent for the NPV of the rental payments to exceed £125,000 (the monthly rent would have to be over £10,500, implying the property is worth £2m+). In these cases the tenant has to file a stamp duty return and pay a small amount of stamp duty.5
That changes fundamentally from 1 May 2026.
The Renters’ Rights Act and the “growing lease” rule
The Renters’ Rights Act converts most short-term tenancies6 into periodic tenancies. The Act didn’t amend stamp duty legislation, so we have to look at the standard stamp duty rule for periodic tenancies in paragraph 4 of Schedule 17A Finance Act 2003.
Under what’s sometimes called the “growing lease” rule:
This means that many residential tenancies will now become subject to stamp duty. This was not the case before the Renters’ Rights Act – the usual practice in the private sector of a short fixed-term tenancy, followed by another short fixed-term tenancy, did not trigger the “growing lease” rule.8
The amount of tax will usually be small – the time, cost and hassle of filing the stamp duty return will likely be more significant (particularly as there is no online filing unless you are a solicitor or conveyancer; you have to call HMRC and order a paper form).
Stamp duty was not mentioned in the impact assessment for the Renters’ Rights Act, and we cannot find any other reference to the issue in the official documentation regarding the Bill. We therefore expect that this result is unanticipated.
Some examples:
The student house
Say eight friends are sharing a student house in London (a “house in multiple occupation” or HMO) and they sign the tenancy together (as joint and several tenants). The rent for such a property could easily be £1,000 per person per month, or £96,000 in total each year.
Historically this would have been a one-year tenancy. The stamp duty consequence was that stamp duty looked only at the £96,000 paid in that year. The NPV of this was obviously less than £125,000, so there was no stamp duty.
However the Renters’ Rights Act means that the tenancy is converted into a periodic tenancy.9
So the students have to test the NPV on every anniversary of the tenancy. On the first anniversary they have to calculate the NPV of two years’ rental payments, using the formula in the stamp duty legislation.10 The result is £182,000 – and stamp duty of £573 is due (i.e. 1% of the difference between £182,000 and £125,000). A similar calculation, and a payment, will be required every year.
If the HMO was let on separate tenancies then the issue wouldn’t arise (as stamp duty would look at each individual tenancy). That’s the case for most non-student HMOs.
Ordinary households
In the great majority of cases, the rent will be much smaller than in the student HMO example, so it will take longer for stamp duty to be triggered.
For example:
For England as a whole, the median rent for new tenancies is about £960 per month11 – a £125,000 NPV would be reached, on the 13th anniversary, triggering an £8 stamp duty bill.
In London as a whole, median rent is about £1,80012 – stamp duty of £70 would be triggered on the sixth anniversary.
In Kensington, median rent is about £3,100 per month13 – so stamp duty of £116 would be triggered on the third anniversary.
What happens to tenancies signed before 1 May 2026?
If a tenancy was granted for a fixed term from (say) 2 May 2025, what happens when the Renters’ Rights Act comes into effect? The Act is clear that the previous tenancy continues, but as a periodic tenancy.14 So, is the tenant required to undertake a one-year anniversary calculation on 2 May 2026?
The position is not entirely clear, but we believe the answer is that the first calculation would be made on 2 May 2027 (provided the tenancy still exists then). The reason is that the stamp duty legislation has a specific provision (in paragraph 3) covering leases for “a fixed term that may continue beyond the fixed term by operation of law”. This provides that the lease is deemed to be extended by one year, and for the first stamp duty return to be filed within 14 days of the end of that year (or, if the tenancy ends before then, 14 days from the date the tenancy ends).
If that’s correct then only in limited circumstances will tenants become subject to SDLT soon after 1 May 2026. Say for example our students from the first example above jointly signed a fixed term tenancy starting in September 2024 and ending in June 2026. The Renters’ Rights Act makes the tenancy a periodic tenancy, but the students still terminate the arrangement in June 2026 as originally planned. In such a case there would be a calculation date in June 2026 and (on the numbers in our example), stamp duty would be due.
We may, however, be wrong. It is possible that HMRC would argue that once the Renters’ Rights Act takes effect, a tenancy that commenced on 2 May 2025 is no longer a “lease for a fixed term”, so paragraph 3 does not apply at all. On that view, the standard rule in paragraph 4 would govern the position. Paragraph 4 treats a periodic tenancy as a lease for an indefinite term, which is initially taken to be a one-year lease for SDLT purposes. Because Schedule 17A operates by reference to the original effective date of the lease, that one-year treatment would be anchored to the original start date of the tenancy. The result would be a calculation date of 2 May 2026 – a very unfortunate result, and one we cannot discount.
We propose below that the law is changed to resolve the growing lease problem entirely for most residential tenancies. If that is not done before 1 May 2026, then it would be helpful if HMRC could clarify that anniversary dates will not fall before 1 May 2027 (save in termination cases, where HMRC could agree not to pursue penalties).
So how many people will be affected overall?
We estimate over 150,000 households will have to start filing and paying stamp duty at some point in the next three years. Many more would pay in the years after that – illustrated in the chart at the top of this report.
These figures come from a model we constructed, using the official data on how long private renters typically stay in one property.15 For each tenure-length band, we calculated the rent that would trigger SDLT at the relevant anniversary (using the kind of NPV calculation above), then estimated the share of renters paying at least that rent using a log-normal approximation calibrated to EHS and ONS rent statistics. Applying these proportions to the size of the private rented sector16 gives an estimate of how many households would eventually face an SDLT filing obligation:
Only a very small number of renting households pay SDLT under current rules – just a few hundred.
Under the new rules, around 150,000 will become liable to file and pay within three years (i.e. by 2029).
Another 110,000 would become liable to pay and file within the three years after that (i.e. by 2032).17
Another 60,000 would become liable at some point after that – so, eventually, a total of around 330,000 households will be affected.
We set out the methodology in full below, and the calculations, inputs and sources can all be seen in this Excel file.
The impact on tenants
The amount of stamp duty would normally be very small. The Kensington flat example would owe about £116 of stamp duty on the third anniversary of the tenancy, £300 on the fourth anniversary, and an additional (and slightly decreasing) amount every subsequent year.
The problem is a practical one. The responsibility for filing and paying stamp duty lies with tenants. These rules were designed for property transactions handled by professionals familiar with NPV calculations. Expecting ordinary people to understand the rules, monitor anniversary dates, carry out an NPV calculation and file and pay stamp duty is not realistic.
If tenants fail to file a stamp duty return with HMRC, there would be an automatic £100 fixed penalty, rising to £200 after three months (plus additional tax-geared penalties after twelve months).
This is not a rational result. The administrative cost and hassle, for tenants and HMRC, will likely exceed the tax at stake.
The response from the Government
We received this response from Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:
In the private rented sector, stamp duty land tax is payable on cumulative rents of over £125,000. Periodic tenancies are treated initially as being for a fixed term of one year and, since tenancies cannot be assured if they have a rent of over £100,000, no new assured periodic tenancy will be immediately liable for SDLT after the Bill is commenced (see SDLTM14050). Periodic tenancies may subsequently become liable for SDLT if they continue beyond one year, however (see SDLTM14070).
At present, where periodic tenancies exist and a lease is renewed by renegotiation then the term starts again and new SDLT thresholds would apply. Because of this, the tax threshold will never be reached for the vast majority of private tenants.
If any changes are needed to accommodate the new tenancy system within the SDLT regime, this will be announced at a fiscal event as normal.
This summarises the current SDLT treatment of periodic tenancies, but doesn’t address how making periodic tenancies the default will greatly expand the number of tenants facing repeated anniversary calculations and potential filing obligations. That suggests the interaction between the Renters’ Rights Act and SDLT has not been fully considered.
How to change the law
We expect the Government will regard this result as both unexpected and undesirable.
It would be sensible to change the law to prevent stamp duty filing/payment obligations resulting from normal residential tenancies.
Any solution has to avoid either an unintentional tax cut for high value property18, or creating new anomalies19 We also don’t think there’s a simple procedural fix.20
SDLT is not meant to impose disproportionate compliance costs for trivial liabilities. Our suggestion is therefore to prevent a small figure from an NPV calculation triggering any stamp duty consequences. We’d simply defer any stamp duty filing or payment obligation under the “growing lease” rule until the stamp duty reaches £5,000 (with all filing and payment obligations falling-away if the tenancy ended before that figure was reached).21 This means:
For most tenants, no stamp duty would ever fall due.
Even most “high end” rental properties would only pay stamp duty in rare cases – for example that average Kensington flat would only hit £5,000 of stamp duty after 25 years.22
Student HMOs would in practice never face a stamp duty bill, because students will leave after three or four years, and a £5,000 stamp duty bill would only arise (on the £96,000 rent example above) after seven years.
The cost to HM Treasury would be very low, as the only significant revenues from these rules come from very high value lettings, and they would be unaffected.
It’s easy to implement, shouldn’t result in any material tax losses, and would prevent large numbers of tenants being landed with a stamp duty headache they never expected.
How we estimated how many tenants will be affected
We start with official data on how long tenants typically stay in one home, combine it with data on rents, and then estimate how many of today’s tenants will still be in the same property when the stamp duty rules start to bite.
There are three steps:
Step 1: How long tenants stay in one property
The English Housing Survey publishes data showing, at a single point in time, how long current private renters have been in their home (for example, less than a year, 1–2 years, 3–5 years, and so on). This is cross-sectional data: it tells us how long existing tenancies have lasted so far, not how long they will last in total.
Long tenancies are over-represented in such snapshots (because they are around for longer), so we first convert this data into an estimate of tenancy survival: the probability that a tenancy which exists today will still be in place after 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, etc.
To do this, we:
treat each official duration band as covering a range of years (e.g. 3–5 years),
calculate an implied “per-year” density within each band, and
derive survival probabilities at the start and end of each band.
Between the official bands, we interpolate survival smoothly so that it declines year-by-year but exactly matches the survey data at the band boundaries.
Step 2: Linking survival to the stamp duty rules
Under the “growing lease” rule, stamp duty is tested at fixed anniversaries of a tenancy (after 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, etc.). At each anniversary, there is a monthly rent above which the net present value of future rent exceeds £125,000 and stamp duty becomes payable.
For each anniversary year we therefore calculate:
the monthly rent that would trigger stamp duty at that anniversary (using the statutory 3.5% discount rate), and
the share of renters paying at least that rent, estimated using a log-normal approximation calibrated to official rent statistics.
We assume (for lack of joint data) that rent levels are independent of how long tenants stay.
Step 3: Counting tenants who are affected for the first time
A tenancy can only become subject to stamp duty once. So for each anniversary year we estimate:
the probability a tenancy survives to that anniversary, multiplied by
the share of renters whose rent is high enough to trigger stamp duty at that anniversary but not earlier.
Applying these proportions to the total number of households in the private rented sector gives an estimate of how many of today’s tenants will first face a stamp duty filing and payment obligation after 1 year, after 2 years, after 3 years, and so on.
Assumptions, limitations and sources of error
These are very approximate estimates and should be regarded as indicative rather than statistically robust.
We have made several simplifying assumptions that tend to reduce the estimated number affected in the short term (notably, no rent increases and no behavioural response). However, other modelling choices – particularly the inferred survival curve and the rent distribution approximation – could bias results in either direction.
These are stock estimates, looking at households renting at commencement of the Act on 1 May 2026. New tenancies after May 2026 would add further cases over time; within the first three years the incremental effect is likely modest relative to other uncertainties, but it would increase the totals.
The calculation excludes social housing and lodgers – we are only looking at households.
Rent levels are assumed independent of tenancy length – that’s necessary due to lack of joint data; the impact on the final estimate is not clear to us. If higher rents correlate with shorter tenancies (plausible), our method overstates longer-term SDLT incidence; if higher rents correlate with longer tenancies (also plausible in some segments), we understate long-term SDLT incidence.
Rent distribution is approximated using a log-normal model calibrated to mean and median rents; rent distributions have been found to be log-normal, but the results should nevertheless be regarded as no more than indicative.
For simplicity we assume rent is constant in nominal terms over the tenancy (i.e. no rent increases). In practice rents typically rise over time; allowing for rent increases would bring forward SDLT liability and increase the number of households affected within a given time horizon.
The data on length of residence is in bands of more than one year. We assign a single “median growing lease anniversary” per band as a pragmatic shortcut, but it is a source of discretisation error.
Our estimate likely under-counts the kind of student joint tenancy HMO that we covered in the first example; they will be under-estimated by the log-normal approximation (because economically the students are renting individually, but legally (we assume) they are renting jointly).
Our approach ignores the technical point footnoted above – the possibility that tenancies starting before 1 May 2026 which convert to periodic tenancies on that date might have their first anniversary almost immediately. We instead assume our technical conclusion is correct, so there can be no first anniversary before 1 May 2027.
Most importantly, this is a static estimate, ignoring behavioural responses. The intended outcome of the Renters’ Rights Act is that people will stay in rental properties for longer; that will of course mean more tenants come into scope of stamp duty than our estimate suggests.23
The estimates should therefore be treated as indicative – but are in our view sufficient to show that the issue is real, widespread, and likely to grow over time unless addressed.
The calculations, inputs and sources can all be seen in this Excel file.
Many thanks to Aadam Ashton for the original tip – he deserves sole credit for spotting this point. Thanks John Shallcross and K for their SDLT expertise. Thanks to B for help with the statistical data and analysis.
Filing over a year late can result in tax-geared penalties. There is also interest for late payment (but, oddly, no penalties). ↩︎
Technically the tax is stamp duty land tax – “stamp duty” is a different tax entirely. However, most people call SDLT “stamp duty” and so we will do so in this article in the interests of clarity. Our apologies to SDLT experts. ↩︎
Housing law usually calls these arrangements “tenancies”. SDLT legislation instead uses the term “lease”, and a residential tenancy will usually be a “lease” for these purposes. In this section we use the terms interchangeably. ↩︎
Subject to the anti-avoidance rules around “linked” transactions – see Robert King’s comment below. ↩︎
For all but the most expensive properties the actual tax will be small (1% of the excess over £125,000) – the filing obligation is often more painful than the actual cost. ↩︎
With a few exceptions, e.g. certain student properties, for which see further below. ↩︎
All these calculations look at the SDLT rules as at the date the lease was signed, with subsequent changes to rates and thresholds therefore irrelevant. ↩︎
Because SDLT applies by reference to each new lease rather than a single “growing” lease, so the periodic-tenancy rules rarely become relevant to residential leases in practice. It’s an example of a particularly formalistic tax rule. ↩︎
There is an exception for purpose-built student accommodation, and large student housing developments with 15+ students in one building, but there’s no exception for student accommodation/HMOs in general. ↩︎
The statutory formula is:
Where ri is the rent payable in respect of year i, n is the term of the lease (in years), and T is the statutory discount rate (currently 3.5%). The formula therefore deems the rent to be paid annually and in arrear, even when it isn’t; for short leases this can produce a very different result from a “real” NPV calculation. In Excel you can use the PV function, e.g. PV(3.5%, 2, -96000, 0,0). ↩︎
The median English rent in the year to September 2023 was £850. The ONS no longer publishes the median rent, only the mean – the “Private rental market summary statistics in England” series was discontinued after the December 2023 release. We can, however, approximate the current median by assuming the median has increased at the same rate as the mean. This is a heuristic, not a statistically robust estimate. ↩︎
The source for this is ONS London data which shows median rents by bedroom counts, but no overall median. However the data does show the count of properties in each bedroom count. We can take from this that the overall median rent falls 36% of the way into the two bedroom property band, and interpolate the overall median. We then up-rate this by 4% reflecting rent inflation ↩︎
This figure is estimated from the ONS’s average/mean for Kensington of £3,700/month. Again please regard as a heuristic not a statistically robust estimate. ↩︎
In contradistinction to some previous housing reforms, which have resulted in a new tenancy being deemed to be granted. ↩︎
The link is to the most recent data, for 2023/24. We up-rate by 1% population growth each year to give an approximate figure of 4.8 million for 2026/27). ↩︎
i.e. because their rent is lower and so more years are required before the NPV hits £125,000. ↩︎
For example exempting residential property from the “growing lease” rule. That would reflect the way land transaction tax works in Wales, where LTT simply doesn’t apply to residential leases – but presumably that has a limited impact given high value residential lettings are less common in Wales than England. ↩︎
For example, it might be thought an obvious solution would be to exclude deemed periodic tenancy from the “growing lease” rule. That would however create the anomalous result that a lease explicitly stated to be periodic could trigger stamp duty, when one with a fixed term (and deemed to be periodic) would not. People would accidentally end up with very different stamp duty results. ↩︎
In principle much of the problem could be eliminated if “growing lease” SDLT reporting became automatic; but that would require new systems, and would take time for HMRC to implement. We doubt the cost would be justified. Alternatively, some might suggest moving the responsibility and liability onto landlords and/or letting agents – that would, however, be a significant change in how stamp duty applies… and many landlords will in practice be no more able to operate the rules than their tenants. ↩︎
Why £5,000? The purpose of the threshold is not to define what is “small” in the abstract, but to separate cases where SDLT has a real purpose (and raises real revenue) from cases where it is imposing disproportionate compliance costs (for negligible revenue). A threshold at this level has three effects. First, it removes almost all ordinary residential tenancies from scope, including joint student tenancies, because realistic periods of occupation do not generate SDLT liabilities of this magnitude. Second, it leaves genuinely high-value residential leasing unaffected, because long fixed-term or very high-rent arrangements reach this level quickly and would still give rise to SDLT liabilities. Third, it ensures that SDLT only arises where the amounts at stake are sufficient to justify professional advice, monitoring and enforcement. ↩︎
In theory this is lost revenue for HMRC, but it’s revenue we expect nobody ever anticipated – certainly it’s not in the RRA impact assessment. ↩︎
We considered whether evidence from Scotland’s abolition of no-fault eviction in 2017 could be used to quantify the effect on tenancy length. However, pre-pandemicdata show only small changes in short-term churn, which are too small to be distinguished from sampling and modelling uncertainty (and the confounding effect of the pandemic means it’s not safe to compare e.g. 2017 and 2025). We therefore do not attempt to model this dynamic effect quantitatively. ↩︎
Nearly 100,000 properties in England and Wales – worth c£460bn – are owned by offshore companies. We’ve conducted an extensive analysis and created an interactive map that lets you search by property or location, and see where offshore companies are being used to hide the true ownership of the property. In 44% of cases, representing c£190bn of property, the real human owner (the “beneficial owner”) is hidden, despite the law requiring disclosure.
Some of this will be accidental, but the evidence suggests that a significant proportion is intentional. Some people are just not registering. Others are registering offshore companies as beneficial owners, rather than the individuals who really control the property. And over a fifth of all properties are held by trusts that fail to declare the true owner.
The UK’s failure to properly enforce its own rules is enabling tax evasion, money laundering, sanctions-busting and corruption. The Times has a report here.
This reports sets out our findings in detail and proposes legal and enforcement changes. We also provide open access to our map, so that you can find properties near you, or anywhere in England and Wales, owned by offshore companies that are not correctly disclosing their true ownership.
We have published our methodology in full so that interested parties can reproduce, challenge and improve our analysis.
The rules, and who’s ignoring them
In 2022, new rules required most overseas entities owning UK real estate to register with Companies House and declare who owns them – their “beneficial owners“. As manypeoplehave pointed out, the rules have been widely ignored.
We analysed data1 from the Land Registry for England and Wales, cross-referenced to Companies House and other data sources. Disappointingly, our analysis has to exclude Northern Ireland because the data isn’t available, and exclude Scotland because Registers of Scotland imposes unacceptable licensing terms. More on that here.
Our analysis puts every offshore owner in one2 of the following categories:
Grey: We have no idea who owns 8% of the offshore companies owning English/Welsh of property. They ignored the law, and the company failed to register with Companies House.
Red: Another 5% of offshore companies list a foreign company as their beneficial owner, hiding the real individuals controlling the company. This is generally unlawful.
Amber: Another 10% of overseas companies are registered with Companies House, but claim they have no beneficial owner. In most cases this is not correct – it’s hiding the true owners.
Blue: 21% of offshore companies list a beneficial owner who is just a trustee – the largest category of hidden ownership. The real beneficial owner is not identified. We believe in most cases this is unlawful.
Green: That leaves 56% of offshore companies where the real beneficial owner is clearly being disclosed.
What the colour categories mean
(If you click on the word “category” anywhere in this article, a window will pop up with the colour codes and explanations.)
In some cases the overseas property owners are taking a legally correct or at least defensible position. But in most of the cases we’ve looked at, they are not.
Technical terms in this article
Proprietor
The person or persons registered at the Land Registry as owning land in England/Wales
The register of overseas entities was last analysed in detail in Catch me if you can: Gaps in the Register of Overseas Entities, from the Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE). The overall picture of non-compliance hasn’t changed, other than that the number of overseas entities claiming to have no beneficial owner has more than doubled. 3
Explore the data, and see who’s hiding ownership near you
Here’s our interactive webapp. If you’re on mobile, or want to view full screen, click here. You will need to register and agree to terms before using. This isn’t a formality – the Land Registry requires us to retain your email address and IP address (but we do not, and technically cannot, see what you are doing with the app). More on this below.
The colour codes in the webapp reflect the colour categories.
The webapp will start a tutorial when you load it; you can run it at any time by clicking the “help” icon.
Full details below of the webapp, our methodology, its limitations, and what we think it demonstrates. Please don’t jump to assumptions about tax evasion/avoidance/illegality without reading this report in full. Locations of markers are approximate. All the information in the webapp comes from publicly available sources.
How many overseas owners fail to disclose?
Here’s the proportion of property owners failing to identify the beneficial owner, broken down by the date of the transaction – reporting started in 2023, and transactions from earlier years were required to register later that year.4
The number of proprietors simply failing to register is much lower now than for the “legacy” pre-2023 registrations: 1% in 2025 compared to 9% pre-2023. That’s to be expected: if someone buys a property today then the conveyancer is likely to remind them of the registration obligation, and the lender likely to enforce it.5
However, the number of proprietors claiming to have no beneficial owner has more than doubled – 9% before 2023, 11% in 2024 but 19% in 2025. There will always be a certain proportion of proprietors that genuinely have no beneficial owner, but it’s not obvious why that would increase over time. A plausible explanation is that the lack of enforcement has emboldened people to make false statements.
And here’s our illustrative estimate of the total value of offshore-held property in each category. The total value of all offshore-owned property is c£460bn, of which c£190bn does not have an individual beneficial ownership disclosed.
If we break it down by region:
These figures are illustrative estimates, and not statistically robust – they should therefore be regarded as broad, order-of-magnitude estimates intended to indicate scale rather than precision. We take the average price paid for overseas-entity properties that had a recorded purchase price in 2023–2025, and then scale up by the number of overseas-entity properties in each category. That can’t be done for regions with very small numbers of transactions in a year (e.g. Yorkshire and Humberside had no offshore transactions between 2023 and 2025).
The estimates are based on Land Registry price-paid entries from 2023–2025 for overseas-entity properties.6 For each category we compute an average price from that sample, then multiply by the total number of properties in the category. We attempt to remove obvious duplicates caused by portfolio transactions.7, and extrapolate to the full stock of property held by overseas entities.
There are numerous reasons why this won’t statistically represent the actual value of the properties.8
Is there a difference for different property types?
We can only identify the type of property for some of the entries in the dataset but, where we can, residential property makes up about a quarter of the total. Land Registry data lets us distinguish between “detached”, “semi-detached”, “terraced”, “flat/maisonette” or (residential or non-residential) “other”9. The categorisation is not perfectly accurate and very incomplete – most residential properties are not identified at all by our current approach (and more on this below).
There is a reasonably clear trend: detached properties are almost twice as likely to be in the “red” category (company disclosed as the hidden beneficial owner, hiding the real owner):
Which countries are the worst offenders?
Jersey is by far and away the jurisdiction with the largest number of companies holding English/Welsh real estate. So it’s unsurprising that Jersey also has the largest number of companies which are hiding their ownership (you can hover over the categories to see the full data):
It’s more meaningful to look at the percentage of real estate holding companies in each country which are potentially non-compliant:
Looking at the worst offenders:
Saudi Arabia has a small number of companies holding English/Welsh property (only 260) but 90% are non-compliant. This is disproportionately down to just a small number of proprietors. Mohammed A.Al-Faraj Corp. for Trading & Contracting owns 125 properties in the UK but isn’t registered with Companies House. Another, Takamul Economic Solutions owns 37 properties but isn’t registered. And International Capital Real Estate Company LLC owns 29 but isn’t registered. The links in this paragraph should take you directly to the relevant view in the webapp (if you are registered and logged-in).
Singapore has 2,114 companies and 70% are non-compliant. That alarming statistic is, however, mostly driven by just one company – Profitable Plots PTE. It holds 1,000+ properties in the UK but hasn’t registered with Companies House, probably because its directors were jailed in Singapore for financial fraud.10 So it would be unfair to draw any wider conclusions about Singapore.
Often ownership is hidden by mistake – people don’t understand how the rules work. But it seems that sometimes very aggressive legal interpretations are being taken.
We can illustrate this by looking at the statistics for each category in turn, and then reviewing the specific details of the most expensive properties in each category.11
Red – ownership hidden behind a foreign company
The red category properties are where there’s no individual beneficial owner declared, just a company. In most cases this is unlawful.12
We can get a sense of the varied reasons why companies are in the “red” category if we use the webapp to look at the most expensive properties in that category.
The most expensive “red” property is part of Arundel Great Court and the Howard Hotel, 12 Temple Place, London. It was acquired for £793m on 10 October 2025 by a Jersey company, Store Holdings South Ltd. That company gives its beneficial owner as another Jersey company, Store Holdings Group Ltd. That looks like a breach of the rules – the registered beneficial owner should usually be an individual. It therefore seems likely that the true owner is being hidden; perhaps accidentally, perhaps intentionally.
The second most valuable is Christian Dior’s £164m flagship shop at 161 and 162 New Bond Street, together acquired for £313m . It’s owned by a Luxembourg company which registers its beneficial owner as LVMH SE. The LVMH group is listed; however the parent/listed entity is LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE – so that’s the entity that should be listed as the beneficial owner. However there may be a larger error than this. 65% of the voting shares in LVMH are controlled by the Arnault family. Query if in fact Bernard Arnault should be listed as a beneficial owner.
Next, a mews in Kensington, acquired for £194m in 2019 and owned by an Abu Dhabi company, Medco Holding Ltd. It registers its beneficial owner as International Capital Trading LLC. But this company isn’t listed; it shouldn’t be given as the beneficial owner. International Capital Trading is a bona fide business, but it’s hiding its true owner. That’s not permitted.
City landmark 1 Poultry, acquired in 2025 for £110m. It’s owned by One Poultry Trustee No. 1 Limited and One Poultry Trustee No. 2 Limited. The first registers two further trustees as its beneficial owner; the second registers none at all. Until 2025 it was owned by Hana Alternative Asset Management; it’s now owned by unnamed Korean institutional investors. Given the wide ownership, it’s probably correct that no individual beneficial owner is registered.
A £108m logistics unit in Chiswick is owned by two trustees in the Boreal group. Apex Group trustees are registered as beneficial owners, together with a UK company, a Jersey company and “The Asticus Foundation”. The Jersey company and the foundation don’t appear to be registrable beneficial owners; they should not have been registered. Boreal is owned by four individuals – query if they should have been listed.
Mayfair properties acquired for £94m in 2023 by a Jersey company, which registers its beneficial owner as a Bermudan company, Brookfield Wealth Solutions Ltd. That Bermudan company should not have been registered. Brookfield is widely held, and so probably the correct answer is that nobody should have been registered. The incorrect registration of the Bermuda company therefore provided more transparency than if Brookfield had followed the technically correct approach.
When we see these kinds of questionable registrations for the most valuable and highest profile companies, it suggests that non-compliance is widespread.
Grey – failed to register
The grey category properties are where the proprietor simply hasn’t registered with Companies House:
The most common reason why a company is in this category is that it broke the law and didn’t register with Companies House. There are other reasons:
It did register, but with a typo in its name, so the app doesn’t match it.
It changed its name, but didn’t update its Land Registry entries.13
Our code has made a mistake and failed to match when it should have done.
Again looking at the most expensive properties:
A mansion at 4 Grafton Street in Mayfair, bought in 2018 for £69m and one of the most expensive houses in London. It’s registered to 4 Grafton Street Limited, but no such company is registered with Companies House. The property is said to be owned by a German national. This looks like a straightforward failure to register.
Another grand house, 19 Hill Street, sold for £52m in 2008. It’s registered to a “Hill International Investments Inc” which hasn’t registered with Companies House.15
Amber category properties are where the overseas entity says it has no beneficial owners:
Sometimes a company has no beneficial owner under the overseas entity rules. This could be the case, for example, if there’s no one person who holds more than 25% of the shares, more than 25% of the voting rights, or exercises significant influence or control over the company. Often very valuable properties genuinely have no single beneficial owner, because they’re owned and controlled by widely held entities like pension funds, private equity funds and other similar arrangements. In such a case it is correct to file with the register of overseas entities on that basis, and list the “managing officers” instead.
However we again see a pattern of questionable registrations. Take the top five most valuable amber properties:
The W Hotel at Leicester Square (10 Wardour Street) is owned by a Jersey company, Arctic Leicester Square Ltd, which claims to have no beneficial owner. The hotel is owned by the Al Faisal Holding Company of Qatar, which appears to be controlled by Sheikh Faisal Bin Qassim Al Thani. It’s therefore unclear why he isn’t registered as the beneficial owner.
It’s no coincidence that three out of these five hold the real estate in Jersey – as the chart above shows, Jersey is by far the most significant offshore centre for holding UK real estate.
Our review suggests a significant number of private equity and fund management companies aren’t complying with the rules. But there are exceptions.
Blackstone are the world’s largest alternative asset management. They register their founder and CEO, Stephen Schwarzman, as the beneficial owner of over 1,000 properties. Blackstone is listed, and many businesses in this position therefore only register the listed company as the beneficial owner. But Blackstone have gone a step further, and asked: is there a person who in practice exercises significant influence over the company? The answer to that question was that there is such a person – Stephen Schwarzman. Blackstone appear to be one of a minority in the real estate industry who apply the rules properly.
Blue – only trustees declared
Blue category properties are where the only beneficial owners declared by the overseas entity are trustees. Transparency International has previously identified a widespread failure to disclose the true beneficial owner of trust structures. We believe the position is even more serious.
It is generally correct to identify trustees as beneficial owners (even where they are companies). However, in most situations where a trustee owns property, it in practice acts at the behest of another party. That makes sense – not many people would put property in trust if they wouldn’t be able to influence the trustees. And this is the key point: an individual with significant influence/control over the trustees’ activities is specifically required by the rules to be registered as the beneficial owner. However, in almost all cases, they are not. The trust industry appears to be systematically ignoring the law.
Here’s the breakdown by country:
The top five commercial properties owned by trusts:
The Intercontinental Hotel at the O2 was acquired in 2016 by a Jersey company for £400m. The Jersey company names two trustees as its beneficial owner – and no human beneficial owner. The hotel is reported to be owned by the Arora Group, controlled by Surinder Arora. The Arora Group itself says it has no beneficial owners; it is not obvious why that is correct. If Mr Arora is the controller of the Arora Group then we expect he has significant influence over the trustees, and therefore should be named as a beneficial owner of the Jersey company.
Land in Watford was acquired in 2019 for £250m by two Jerseycompanies. Both companies list only Croxley Master Trustee Limited as their beneficial owner. We expect the trust is in practice acting at the behest of the ultimate owners of the structure. A planning document suggests the ultimate owners may be the BAE Pension fund and Goldman Sachs. Pension schemes are generally exempt from beneficial ownership disclosure, but if Goldman Sachs has a 25% interest then it should have registered its listed US parent as a beneficial owner.
Mulberry’s flagship store at 50 New Bond Street was acquired in 2021 for £198m by twoJersey trustee companies. The building is owned by the Al Khashlok Group, and the founder of the group, Dr Awn Hussein Al Khashlok is registered as a director of the companies. So it’s surprising that the Jersey companies claim to have no beneficial owner. We expect in practice they are under de facto control or, at least, significant influence by Dr Al Khashlok.
An office building in Aldgate was acquired in 2019 for £183m by twoJersey trustee companies, which claim to have no beneficial owners. The directors are employees of Ogier, the Jersey law firm. The building appears to be really owned by Singapore investment company City Developments Limited, which is 43% owned by member of the Hong Leong group, a family owned conglomerate. The question is whether there are individuals who in practice have significant influence or control over the trustees.
280 Bishopsgate was acquired in 2020 for £173m by two Jerseytrustees, which appear to be operated by fund administrator Langham Hall. We expect they in practice are under the de facto control and influence of the ultimate owners, CBRE Investment Management, King Street Real Estate GP, L.L.C. and Arax Properties. Arax says it’s controlled by one individual. CBRE is controlled by its listed parent CBRE, Inc. We don’t know which, if any of King Street’s partners control it. However it’s reasonably clear that CBRE and Arax’s owner should be listed as beneficial owners of the Jersey trustees.
The top six residential properties owned by trusts:
9 Holland Park in London (Richard Branson’s former house) was acquired for £53m in 2016 by a BVI company. The beneficiaries are listed as two Isle of Man trustees. In practice we expect an individual has significant influence/control over the trustees’ activities and should be registered – but isn’t. So we don’t know who really owns the property.
Just around the corner is 8 Abbotsbury Road, acquired for £21m in 2016 by a Bahamas company (which is overdue filing its Companies House return). The beneficiary is listed as a Cayman Islands trustee, again holding for an unknown person or persons.
Apartment 51, 17 Park Crescent, London, was acquired for £18m in 2021 by a Delaware LLC. The registered beneficiary is Robert Frederick Smith. The exact same ownership structure is used for other apartments in the same building, acquired for a total of £60m in 2020/21. Robert Smith appears to be the American investor (the date of birth matches, and he uses the same correspondence address for other companies that he owns). However Mr Smith is registered as a trustee, rather than owning in his own right. Someone presumably has control of the trust – and they’re not registered (it may well be Mr Smith himself).
Flat 1, 33 Chesham Place, London was acquired for £16m in 2017 by a BVI company. The registered beneficiary is a Singapore corporate trustee holding (once again) for an unknown person or persons.
Why are trustees not complying with the law?
There are two factors here:
Most of the commercial property above is likely owned by “Jersey property unit trusts” (JPUTs). These are legitimate investment vehicles used for commercial real estate investment.17 However these funds are typically directed/managed by an investment manager of some kind: where that investment manager has beneficial owners, they should be listed as beneficial owners of entity owning the property. They almost never are.
The other properties will be held by private trusts of some kind, typically discretionary trusts established for financial planning and/or tax reasons. Few if any people put property into trust without a way of ensuring the trust does what they want. Typically this is achieved by the settlor sending a “letter of wishes” to the trustee which they are not legally required to follow, but in practice always do. In our view this is “significant influence” and/or de facto control, and so the settlor should be registered. However we see numerous discretionary trusts where no settlor is registered. Take, for example, Cove Estates Ltd – an Isle of Man company which holds five titles in Cornwall. Its beneficial owner is declared to be Knox House Trustees Limited, a company owned by Douglas Barrowman. However there is no entry for Barrowman or whatever other persons have significant control/influence over the trustees (and therefore over Cove Estates Ltd). That is very unlikely to be correct.
We can get a sense of how widespread this is by looking at the number of properties held by the big professional trustees, and counting how mnay times we see a true individual beneficial owner disclosed, and how many times we don’t.
Our analysis shows 201 professional trustees registered as beneficial owners of UK properties. Of those, 181 have never once disclosed a true beneficial owner. This chart shows the other 20 trustees, who’ve disclosed a true beneficial owner at least once, and the percentage of their properties where full disclosure was made:
Looking at the trustees that appear to top this chart, and therefore be the most compliant:
JTC Trustees appears to have a high level of correct reporting because their Companies House entry discloses they are held by JTC plc, a listed company. That is correct disclosure of their own position; however they don’t appear to ever disclose individuals as beneficial owners.
Line Trust Corporation Limited appears to have a high level of correct reporting because their properties in London’s East End often show a Gibraltar individual, Douglas Ryan, as a beneficial owner.
Chancery Trustees and Oak Trust (Guernsey) Limited seem to genuinely disclose individual beneficial owners in a material number of cases, making them unusual in the trust market.
Standard Bank Offshore Trust Company Jersey Ltd discloses two individuals as beneficial owners, but they appear to be employees of Standard Bank. The true beneficial owners are not disclosed, so far as we can see.
Bad as this all is, our analysis likely under-estimates the secrecy which is being employed by trust companies. There’s evidence that the trust companies are using UK corporate beneficiaries to “block” the beneficial ownership rules. Take an example: this land in Grimsby. It’s owned by two Apex Jersey trustee companies. The beneficial owner is stated to be Apex Consolidation Entity Ltd, a UK company which claims it has no beneficial owners itself. What’s really happening is (we expect) that the land is under the de facto control of the settlor of the trust under a letter of wishes or similar arrangement – the settlor should be registered as a beneficial owner (but isn’t). However because there’s a UK incorporated company declared as beneficiary, our webapp assumes all is well and puts the property in our “green” category.
Is there a “trust loophole”?
A key reason why there’s so little disclosure of the true ownership of these trusts is the widespread belief – almost universal in the world of professional trustees – that there’s a significant loophole in the rules.
The “loophole” looks like this:
Someone – let’s say Vladimir Putin – wishes to hide their ownership of a valuable house in London.
Mr Putin arranges for the house to be acquired by Offshore Trustees Ltd on his behalf.
Offshore Trustees Ltd is a professional trust company in Jersey owned by individuals unrelated to Mr Putin. Like many such companies, it holds hundreds of properties for hundreds of different people.
Offshore Trustees Ltd holds the property on discretionary trust for Mr Putin, in practice always acting as he requests (under a “letter of wishes”).
Or to put it in a structure diagram:
Standard Transparency
🏠
UK Property
🏢
Overseas Company
(Legal Owner)
👤Real Individual Registered as beneficial owner On Register
The “trust loophole”
🏰
UK Property
🏢
Overseas Company
(Legal Owner)
⚖️Offshore Trustees Ltd Registered as beneficial owner On Register
“Letter of wishes” / Significant influence over ownership of house
🕵️Vladimir Putin Actual Controller Hidden / Not on Register
Offshore Trustees Ltd claims it’s technically correct under current law for the owners of Offshore Trustees Ltd to register as the beneficial owners of Offshore Trustees Ltd, and for there to be no entry for Vladimir Putin, even though he’s the one controlling the property. That is the position the corporate trustees we spoke to are taking. The justification is that Mr Putin has no significant influence or control over Offshore Trustees Ltd as a whole, only over a small part of its activities (its ownership of his house).
This, however, completely undermines the point of the register. 18
It is also at odds with the wording of the legislation. Mr Putin’s has his own trust – the only property in the trust is his house (he’s unlikely to be “sharing” a trust with Offshore Trustees Ltd’s other clients, and there would be legal and tax complications if he did). Mr Putin has significant influence or control over the “activities of the trust” even though he doesn’t have significant influence/control over Offshore Trustees Ltd itself. The rules specifically make that distinction, and look at the activities of the trust. This means Mr Putin should be registered as a beneficial owner. We understand the Department for Business and Trade believes this is the correct approach, and therefore the “loophole” does not exist. We agree – that’s the answer consistent with both the spirit and letter of the legislation. However, both our discussions and the evidence above suggest that the trust industry does not agree.
It would be helpful if the Department of Business and Trade could make this point explicit in the guidance. If not, the law should change to put the point beyond doubt.19
Why does it matter?
There is nothing inherently suspicious about a foreign entity holding UK real estate. For example, if you zoom into Canary Wharf, you’ll see Citibank’s UK headquarters, which is held (unsurprisingly) by Citibank. If a foreign person is investing in UK real estate then it is only natural it holds through a foreign company, and UK tax rules will now tax it in broadly the same manner as a UK company – so there is no avoidance here.20
Some people have presented the raw numbers of overseas real estate holders as some kind of problem – that is in our view wrong and misleading.
However it is absolutely a problem when the true ownership is hidden.
In most of the colour category examples above we were able to establish the true ownerships of the largest properties. That’s because they were large properties and their acquisition was often publicised. For smaller properties, and residential properties, this is usually not possible. So the lack of correct disclosure, which was a slight headache for £200m properties, becomes a significant barrier for (say) £10m properties. This creates a series of problems:
Tax. Where a foreign individual owns a “property rich company” holding UK real estate, and sells that company, he or she will in most cases be liable for UK capital gains tax. But if the individual is never disclosed as the beneficial owner, HMRC have no way to know if that sale took place. Each grey, red and blue company represents potential UK lost tax. And of course the owner may also be failing to pay foreign taxes – property is particularly well suited to tax evasion when beneficial ownership can be concealed.
Sanctions. Our app displays (in purple) properties owned by sanctioned individuals and entities. The number of such properties is extremely small – 38. We don’t believe this is correct. We spoke to sanctions experts who expected there would be hundreds or even thousands of UK properties owned by sanctioned Russians – but because they hold via red, grey and blue category companies, we don’t know who they are, and we don’t know what they hold.
Money laundering and corruption. UK property is an excellent safe way to park large amounts of money if you’ve stolen it or are looking to hide it – and the Government’s economic crime plan says that £100 billion laundered through and within the UK. The register of overseas entities should prevent that – but all its flaws mean that in practice it doesn’t.
How to enforce the rules
People are going to continue to ignore the overseas entity rules until there are clear consequences for breach. Only fourteen fines were collected in the two years since the rules were introduced (our of 444 issued).
We would suggest that DBT consider the following steps as part of its next review:
The Department of Business and Trade and/or Companies House should issue a notice warning the trust industry about the widespread failure to register true beneficial owners.
Companies House should start using their civil penalty powers at scale, sending formal notices to proprietors with questionable (or absent) registrations,21 and requiring further information. If there is no satisfactory response, Companies House can now place a warning notice on the Companies House register and a restriction on the Land Registry title (preventing mortgages being obtained or the property being sold).
Where there are good grounds to believe the law has been broken (for example a simple lack of registration, or inadequate response to the formal information notice), Companies House should send formal warning notices and then, if ignored, issue penalty notices (which scale with property value).
This would likely result in many thousands or penalties being issued. History suggests most would be ignored. We’d suggest expanding Companies House existing powers so that a restriction can be placed on title where penalties are not paid.
Companies House should select test cases, with particularly clear facts, for prosecution. The officers of a company commit a criminal offence if it fails to register with the register of overseas entities – with up to two years’ imprisonment and an unlimited fine. About 8% of all properties are in this category. We’re not aware of any prosecutions. It’s rational for people to pay little attention to these rules unless there are clear sanctions for those that intentionally or negligently fail to comply.
It’s always been the case that rules that aren’t enforced may as well not exist.
Limitations and methodology
The code that analysed the Companies House and Land Registry data, and then created the webapp, can be found on our GitHub here. It’s all open source, and everyone is welcome to use/copy/adapt the code and the data, provided they fairly attribute it to us.
The basic approach is as follows:
Go through the Land Registry’s dataset of overseas companies that own property in England and Wales (“OCOD”).
The property type isn’t listed on the overseas company dataset. We therefore cross-check against the Land Registry’s separate price paid dataset, which includes a not-very-reliable flag for the type of property. The price paid dataset doesn’t include the title number, so we cross-check the two datasets first using the price paid and the postcode, and then using fuzzy matching on the address. This is far from completely reliable, and even then only matches a small proportion of the overall properties – properties sold since 1999, with a “price paid”, and where the correct “property type” box was ticked. Further work could be done to improve this.
Use the Companies House API to search for each owner (registered proprietor) on the register of overseas entities. This is complicated by numerous inconsistencies in formatting, spelling, etc.
If the proprietor can be found, then use Companies House’s API again, to identify its beneficial owners, their category (UK company, offshore company, individual, trustee) and the nature of their ownership.
Geolocate the property, the company, the registered proprietors and their beneficial owners, sanity-checking to catch obvious mismatches. Geolocations are by postcode and Google’s geocoding api and therefore will be approximate.
Categorise each owner, and each property, into the colour categories above: green only when every proprietor has at least one individual non‑trustee controller; amber where there’s no registered beneficial owner, grey where we can’t find the named proprietor on Companies House, blue where all the registered beneficial owners are trustees, and red where the only registered beneficial owners are offshore entities (excluding those we’ve found on databases of listed companies).22
This is not straightforward due to the poor quality of the data:
There are many wrong and misspelt company names. Sometimes the errors are small, e.g. Al Jameel Holding Ltd is listed as the proprietor of fourteen properties, but there’s no such company at Companies House. The actual owner is probably Al Jameel Holdings Ltd (with “Holdings” in plural). Similarly, the Pokemon Company International. Inc, which appears to have misspelt its name “Pokermon” on its land registry entry. We show these as “grey” – unregistered owners, as that is both technically correct and avoids us making arbitrary value judgments.
Minor errors abound. Even major companies like Hutchison Ports have typographical errors in their entries – writing “Je49wg” instead of “Jersey”. Or the Pokemon Company International. Inc, which misspelt its name “Pokermon” on its land registry entry.
Where a company is in the Land Registry data but not on Companies House then we check for minor variations; if we can’t find them, we mark it as unregistered. It’s hard to know where the boundary lies between typographical error and failure to register. For example, one overseas entity on the register is “Bontex & Luis Inc”. There is no such company. There is a “Bontex & Luis Inc Ltd“, but that’s a UK company not an overseas entity (so this is unlikely to be a mere typo). We’ve marked Bontex & Luis Inc as unregistered.
In some cases a company’s name has changed but the register wasn’t updated. We try to catch this.
Locating the address isn’t easy. Where there’s a correct postcode we can easily use the ONS postcode list – although many postcodes are large and only give an appropriate result. About a quarter of the approximately 100,000 properties on the register list an incorrect postcode, or no postcode. In these cases we use the Google geocoding api, but when that gives a wrong location (which it often will if the address is mangled), then our location will be wrong.
There are then obviously wrong addresses – e.g. overseas entities giving their address as Guernsey followed by a London postcode.
If you do identify any errors then please get in touch.
The detail is set out in the code published on our GitHub. Our approach necessarily involved a series of judgment calls, and errors are inevitable. Nobody should make any conclusions about particular companies without checking them carefully by hand.
We’d be delighted if others find our code useful, but unfortunately we’re not able to provide any support on installing or using the code.
The first is where companies have been placed on the Land Registry’s list of UK companies owning property in England and Wales rather than the list of overseas companies. We have undertaken an initial analysis, and found some entities that should be on the overseas entity list:
Cases where the stated entity type suggests it’s a foreign company. There are fourteen entities with names ending in “Inc”, ten ending in “SA”, one “NV”, nine in “Corporation” and ten “PTE Ltd”. Many of these are likely innocent errors, but one entry looks potentially fraudulent – an “Apple International SA” owning small plots of land in Durham.
Cases where the given company name says explicitly it’s a foreign company – for example one entry on the register is “CPS Investment Management Limited (incorporated in British Virgin Islands)”.
Financial institutions whose name suggests they are foreign entities: Royal Bank of Canada Trust Company (Jersey) Limited, HSBC Trustee (Singapore) Limited, Kleinwort Benson (Guernsey) Trustees Limited.
Foreign governments: the Hellenic Republic and the Federal Government of the United Arab Emirates. The Hellenic Republic entry shows it owning the Greek Embassy – so this is clearly the real Hellenic Republic which an administrative error misclassified as a UK company. The UAE is listed as owning a modest detached house in Pevensey – we don’t know if that’s misclassification or fraud (i.e. someone using the UAE’s name).
There are other data problems: there are at least thirteen individuals on the list of UK companies.
It’s likely that the initial error in these cases was made by the company/individual buying the property (or their conveyancer).23. The Land Registry says they don’t validate company numbers (which is fair enough), but it appears that they also don’t undertake basic checks of the list.
The above errors are not hugely significant, and probably responsible for no more than 100 proprietors being missing from our analysis.
The second category is more mysterious.
Land Registry records show that a company called Uart International SA acquired a £12m house in Oxfordshire in 1992. However it’s not on the Land Registry’s list of overseas entities holding English/Welsh real estate (or the Land Registry’s list of UK companies). One possibility is that this is an accident (e.g. the company accidentally declared it was an individual). Another is some kind of Land Registry data error.
Uart International SA did comply with the register of overseas entities rules – it registered with Companies House as a Panamanian company. It is concealing its true beneficial owner – likely unlawfully, it declares a BVI company, Shorndean Developments Limited, as its beneficial owner (plus a Cyprus trustee company).24
We don’t know if the case of Uart International SA is a strange one-off error, or the sign of a more systemic problem. It’s not possible to conduct reverse-searches of the Land Registry, so at present we have no way to examine this question further. The Land Registry, on the other hand, could easily search its register for obvious foreign entity names which have not been correctly registered – we expect this would take little more than a simple database query.
However we do know that Uart International SA is a very significant case, because – as the BBC has reported – the Pandora Papers show that Shorndean Developments Limited is ultimately controlled by Vladimir Chernukhin, the former Russian Minister of Finance.
Scotland and Northern Ireland
Our analysis is limited to England and Wales for the simple reason that HM Land Registry makes data for England and Wales available (but see below), but its Scottish and Northern Irish equivalents do not.
There is a Scottish register kept by Registers of Scotland but, for reasons we do not understand, Registers of Scotland told us they prohibit any use that (like this one) makes the full data available for public viewing, and they also require us to have “appropriate security and monitoring controls in place in relation to the data you provide online to ensure customers use it appropriately”. There’s also a requirement that we don’t use the data in any way that could affect Registers of Scotland’s reputation. We can’t agree to this.
We aren’t aware of any arrangements for publishing the Northern Ireland register.
This all has consequences. It’s hard enough to see who is the ultimate owner of UK property, given the widespread non-compliance. But with Scottish property we can’t even start. So, for example, Bagshaw Limited is an Isle of Man company owning property in Glasgow and which was reported to be ultimately owned by Douglas Barrowman and Michelle Mone. There is, however, no easy way to investigate that from publicly available sources.25
HM Land Registry’s impossible licensing terms
The only reason this webapp exists is that The HM Land Registry makes the dataset (of overseas companies owning property in England and Wales) freely available. This is fantastic. However there’s a problem: the Land Registry’s licence contains provisions that require us to collect the name, email address and IP address of all users, and provide them to the Land Registry if for their “audit” purposes:
This is unacceptable from a privacy standpoint, and in the view of the GDPR specialists we spoke to, clearly contrary to GDPR. We’ve no idea why a public body would act in this way.
It also makes no sense. Anyone can go to numerous websites that show every property in the UK, its precise address and estimated current price. Or anyone wanting the overseas entity data can download the underlying Land Registry data directly, as one large spreadsheet, by entering a name verified with a credit card (real or stolen). If you’re a fraudster who wants to quickly identify valuable properties then that spreadsheet is much more useful than our webapp. There is in practice no way to tie a particular fraudulent use of the data with a particular download.
By contrast, our webapp is an awkward tool for criminals, and a convenient tool for journalists, researchers and members of the public. The idea that users of this webapp are a particular fraud risk, justifying routine collection of personal data and handing it over on demand, is indefensible.
We have told HM Land Registry that we will comply with the licence terms so far as they are lawful. UK GDPR overrides any contractual term that would require unlawful processing of personal data. In particular:
We will not provide HM Land Registry with users’ personal data for general “audit” purposes. If HM Land Registry wants to audit compliance, we can provide appropriately redacted records (including no personal information.
We accept that HM Land Registry has a legitimate interest in preventing or detecting crime. But that does not justify handing over everyone’s personal data. We will only disclose personal data where HM Land Registry makes a specific, particularised request and it is “necessary” and therefore lawful under GDPR. It is not clear to us how such a request would ever be necessary and therefore lawful.26
That is why registration is required. We are collecting the minimum personal data needed to run the service and to meet the licence requirements so far as we lawfully can. That includes collecting names, email addresses and IP addresses, but we will absolutely not pass that information to HM Land Registry without a very convincing, and lawful, rationale. We will not pass that information to any other party without a court order (which we would resist). We explain this in our Privacy Notice, and we will be transparent about any request for access we receive.
We do not track how users are using the webapp – and technically we cannot, because the webapp runs entirely locally on the user’s device. So we know if a particular user accessed the webapp at a particular time, and the IP address they accessed it from (unless they are using a proxy or VPN), but we do not know anything else.
We have explained the above to HM Land Registry and suggested they reconsider their licensing terms. They have asserted that their terms are “fair” and “lawful” but haven’t been able to explain why providing them with complete data on all users, their contact details and IP addresses for “audit” purposes is “necessary”.
We don’t know why a public authority is trying to enforce oppressive data collection terms, and we are referring the matter to the Information Commissioner.
You are free to use the map for any purpose – if you find something interesting then we’d be grateful if you could credit us, but you don’t have to.
Thanks to T, C, O and L for most of the analysis and coding, to K1 for specialist ROE input, and to B and A for their GDPR expertise. Thanks to K2 for their expert review. The original concept and coding of our 2023 map was by M. With thanks to CAGE and Transparency International for all their previous work in this area.
Sometimes more than one category apply, for example there is a trust owner and an owner which is a (non-trust) corporate. Our code prioritises the most “serious” category, being broadly red -> grey-> amber -> blue ↩︎
CAGE converted roughly 90,000 titles into an estimated 152,000 properties using a title-to-property conversion, which is a different unit of measurement; they also use somewhat different categories to us, so our counts are not directly comparable with theirs. ↩︎
Note that this is a count of overseas entities/proprietors not titles/properties. ↩︎
Because otherwise their security will be prejudiced; property owned by an overseas entity that isn’t registered can’t be sold. ↩︎
We only use data from 2023, 2024 and 2025 because it’s hard to account for asset price inflation in earlier years. ↩︎
For two reasons. First, if one buyer acquires multiple properties in the same transaction then often each title shows the overall purchase price. So a simple average would massively over-estimate the price paid. Second, in other portfolio cases there could be a transaction that is commercially for £1bn, but split with different values across different properties. We treat this as one transaction. Our deduplication is heuristic and may both miss duplicates and remove genuine distinct purchases, affecting the average price and therefore the scaled total. ↩︎
Most significantly the underlying data is affected by selection bias: high-value commercial and residential property is often transferred via corporate share sales rather than registered land transfers, meaning many valuable assets never appear with a contemporary price on the Land Registry at all. Whilst sales are supposed to always include the price paid, for some very valuable properties people (unlawfully) fail to do so. These factors would tend to make our estimate too low. On the other hand, the result is susceptible to a few very high value transactions – and this would tend to make our estimate too high (but excluding those transactions would create probably a larger source of error). Conversely, the subset of transactions that do appear in recent years may not be representative of the historic stock as a whole (some very valuable property is never sold; some property with a very low value is never sold) – we don’t know what the overall impact of this factor would be. An additional two factors potentially under-estimate value: we are ignoring inflation, and we’re ignoring post-acquisition improvement of properties. ↩︎
A mixture of land, commercial property, mixed use, and non-standard dwellings ↩︎
There are exceptions for Governments and public authorities, UK companies, companies whose shares are listed on a regulated market in the UK, EU or certain other jurisdictions, and corporate trustees. All of these are registrable beneficial owners that should properly be on the register (although that doesn’t prevent any individuals who also have significant influence/control also being on the register). We’ve done our best to screen those out, so the red properties are in most cases companies that should not be on the register. However there will inevitably be errors. Please look at any specific case in detail before jumping to conclusions. ↩︎
There are some surprising examples. Barclays Wealth Trustees (Jersey) Limited owns five properties but isn’t registered with Companies House. The reason seems to be that it changed its name to Zedra Trustees (Jersey) Limited but didn’t update the Land Registry. ↩︎
For unknown reasons, the original Companies House registration in 2022 said the company was incorporated in Gibraltar (even though the land registry entry said it was a Jersey company). This was then updated to Jersey in 2024. ↩︎
The benefit of a JPUT is that investors can own property through a “tax transparent” fund – meaning investors are taxed directly on rental income, rather than there being two levels of taxation, but without the stamp duty land tax complications that would follow from using a partnership or LLP. ↩︎
There was a change of law last year to require simple trusts/nominee arrangements to be registered – but it doesn’t apply to settlements/discretionary trusts. There are also separate rules requiring overseas entities to registerinformation regarding trusts and their settlors and beneficiaries with Companies House. This information is not made public. In principle it can obtained by applications to Companies House, but in practice it is difficult or impossible to make such applications, because you have to know the name of the trust (information that usually only the parties involved will possess). ↩︎
There is a further, deeper, problem. Even if Vladimir Putin was registered as a beneficial owner, he’d be registered as a beneficial owner of the trust company. We wouldn’t have anything tying him to his actual house. Fixing this requires more significant changes to the design of the overseas entity regime. ↩︎
The position used to be different. Foreign companies holding UK real estate have always been subject to UK tax on their rental income, but gains used to be exempt. That changed in 2015 for residential real estate and in 2017 for non-residential real estate. There also used to be an inheritance tax benefit for non-domiciled individuals of holding UK real estate through a foreign company; that went in 2017. There is a brief summary of some of these issues here. It is therefore often the case that UK land is held offshore for historic tax avoidance reasons that no longer apply, but extracting the land from the current entity owning it is more cost/hassle than it’s worth. ↩︎
We anticipate that Companies House and HM Land Registry, with their enhanced data access, could greatly improve on the approach we adopted for this report. ↩︎
We also exclude offshore entities that are themselves registered with Companies House (e.g. because they are proprietors of different properties) and declare individuals as beneficial owners. However there is a source of error here, because we don’t make this check recursive. So if, for example, a property is held by proprietor A, for beneficial owner B, which is an offshore entity registered with beneficial owner C, which is another offshore entity registered with an individual D as beneficial owner, our code will show this property as “red” even though it really should be “green”. We haven’t checked if there are any real cases like this – there may well not be. ↩︎
Because it’s not on the Land Registry entity lists, it’s impossible to tie the company to the Oxfordshire property without (as we did) looking at the individual Land Registry title. ↩︎
i.e. because if a crime was committed using Land Registry data, how would HM Land Registry suspect one of our users, as opposed to anyone else who downloaded the dataset? And how would our user data, merely consisting of times, email addresses and IPs, enable identification of a suspect? ↩︎
Last week we published a report on how a small number of tax barristers facilitate tax avoidance schemes that are, in our view, more properly described as tax fraud. The barristers design the schemes, and/or issue opinions that the schemes work, despite the dismal history of such schemes in the courts over the last 25 years. They achieve this by making unrealistic assumptions of fact and ignoring inconvenient laws and judicial principles.
After we published our report, we wrote to the Bar’s regulators, the Bar Council, and other representative bodies, as well as the most wellknown sets of tax chambers.
The good news is that the regulators and the Bar Council are taking this seriously, with draft guidance on the way. However, the leading tax chambers are in denial, with only one (Gray’s Inn Tax Chambers) providing us with comment before publication of this article. Update: other chambers responded after publication, and their comments are included below.
Here are the responses in full.
The regulator
The Bar Standards Board is the disciplinary body for the barristers‘ profession. We’ve been speaking to them on these issues since early 2025. They told us they’re working on tax guidance for the profession and will be consulting on it shortly.
A spokesperson for the BSB told us:
The Bar Standards Board will always and have always assessed the reports we receive or other information of which we become aware suggesting that barristers are facilitating tax fraud. We are also currently undertaking work on professional ethics and considering further guidance for the profession on how our Core Duties apply to the issues highlighted in the report.
The Legal Services Board is, essentially, the regulator of the legal regulators. It regulates the Bar Standards Board, the Solicitors Regulation Authority, and other similar bodies regulating legal professional services. They told us:
The Legal Services Board (LSB) expects all legal service regulators to ensure that the professionals they oversee act in the public interest and uphold the highest standards of integrity. We take seriously the suggestion that a small number of barristers may be providing legal opinions that facilitate tax schemes which may be fraudulent.
“It is the role of the Bar Standards Board (BSB) to ensure that barristers comply with their professional duties, which include acting with honesty, integrity, and independence. Where there is evidence that these standards are not being met, the BSB must take appropriate action.
“We will continue to hold the frontline regulators, including the BSB, to account for their performance. As part of our focus on professional ethics and the rule of law, we are also developing new expectations for regulators to help ensure that those they regulate uphold their professional ethical duties.
The representative bodies
The Bar Council is the Bar’s professional body and governing council.
They told us:
The report calls for the Bar Standards Board to make it clear that it is a disciplinary matter for a barrister to provide an opinion which facilitates a tax scheme that has no realistic prospect of success, specifically where the assumptions in the opinion would breach a barrister’s core duty to act with honesty and integrity. The Bar Standards Board is independent of the Bar Council. However, the Bar Council would support such a statement from the BSB. In our view, if a barrister were to give tax advice which facilitated a tax scheme which they knew was doomed to fail, this would breach several of the core duties in the BSB handbook. Additional rules are not required because this would already be a breach, but the Bar Council would support such a reminder from the BSB. We understand that the BSB is planning to consult on these issues and we will engage fully with the consultation.
The Revenue Bar Association is the professional association for tax barristers. Their response:
The RBA does not condone the actions of counsel who give advice which they know to be wrong or are reckless as to whether it is wrong. We are clear that this would be a breach of the Bar Standards Board’s (“BSB”) Code of Conduct, which mandates that counsel must act with honesty and integrity (Core Duty CD3) and must not behave in a way which is likely to diminish the trust and confidence which the public places in the profession (Core Duty CD5).
We also note that such conduct could amount to a criminal offence, which could be prosecuted by HMRC. Indeed this was pointed out in the RBA’s response to the HMRC’s consultation document, ‘Closing in on promoters of marketed tax avoidance’ (published 26.03.2025, paras 12 and 17).
Where unsatisfactory conduct is identified, the BSB are best placed to obtain the full picture, investigate matters and discipline counsel appropriately. Importantly, they have the power to address issues of privilege and confidentiality which might otherwise impede a fair investigation. We understand that the BSB will, and has in the past, investigate where allegations of misconduct of the type you describe have been reported to it.
The RBA, in contrast, is an association, consisting of members who practice in Revenue law. It does not have the power, means or authority to investigate members or their work. That said, we do not condone such actions and would seek to expel any member who has been struck off by the BSB.
The Chambers
Barristers practice in chambers – unincorporated associations which let the barristers share premises and administration.
We wrote to eleven of the best-known chambers specialising in tax.
We are not aware of the identities of the “small number of KCs and junior barristers”, to which your article refers and, in any event, we do not comment on the behaviour of particular barristers. It is plainly wrong for any barrister to deliver a legal opinion which does not genuinely and honestly reflect their view, or which rests on assumptions known to be untrue, or which deliberately ignores relevant case law or applicable statutory provisions.
After we published this report, 5 Stone Buildings sent us a response:
We are not in a position to comment on the practice of any particular barrister in any other chambers; but we can say that all our members share the view that opinions should reflect the genuine views of the barrister and should be formed on a realistic view of the facts, and a sensible approach to statute and case law. All our members take seriously their duties under the BSB’s Handbook and we would hope that such an approach is shared across the profession.
We would hope that every chambers would be happy to make similar comments regarding the propriety of issuing a false opinion. However, none of the other chambers provided us with any comment.
After we published this article, Old Square sent us this:
The question on which you asked for comment was, ‘whether your Chambers regards the behaviour of these barristers as appropriate’. The reference to ’these barristers’ was to individuals to whom you had referred, but not named, in your previous report, ‘Rogue barristers are enabling a billion pound tax fraud – and the Bar won’t act’, published on 16th January 2026. We note that, in your article of 21st January 2026, you did not publish this question, so that you did not give the relevant question to which we declined to comment. This Chambers does not comment on alleged behaviour of individual barristers.
However, as a Chambers, we condemn any instance in which a barrister gives an opinion in which s/he has no honest and genuine belief; that is based on facts known to the barrister to be false, or as regards whose veracity the barrister is reckless; or that puts forward a legal analysis that the barrister knows to be untenable, or knows to ignore applicable legislation or case-law. Any such opinion would be a breach of the core duties of honesty and integrity. We regard honesty and integrity as forming part of the foundations of the independent referral bar, and therefore as being qualities that every barrister must apply to every instruction s/he is given.
FCTC does not approve of the behaviour of barristers who produce fraudulent opinions or opinions which they know to be wrong or who are reckless as to whether they are wrong or not.
We believe most of these chambers have no members who are involved in issuing false opinions. But we expect almost all their senior members know exactly who is involved.
Our conclusion is that most of the Tax Bar are in denial. We may see attempts to block or water down draft guidance when it’s issued by the Bar Standards Board. That would be a serious mistake.
Photo of the Royal Courts of Justice by sjiong, and from wikimedia.
A small number of KCs and junior barristers are enabling large-scale tax fraud. They do it by providing tax opinions backing schemes designed to “avoid” tax on wages paid to contractors. The schemes have no real technical basis, but the promoters behind the schemes use the opinions as a badge of credibility – and, more importantly, as a shield. When HMRC shuts a scheme down, the promoters point to the KC’s advice, making any criminal prosecution difficult or even impossible.
In reality, these schemes have no realistic prospect of success. All the KC opinions we’ve seen on these schemes rest on assumptions that are plainly untrue, ignore basic principles of tax law, and don’t bother to address statutory rules designed to stop exactly this kind of arrangement. The opinions aren’t there to be right, and aren’t really legal advice at all – they’re just cover.
This report analyses a new case involving one of these schemes, “Purity”. It was backed by a KC opinion – but the scheme was hopeless. None of the remuneration tax specialists we spoke to thought it had any prospect of success. One respected senior tax KC (not involved in these schemes) described the Purity scheme as “incompetent and impossible”. A senior tax lawyer specialising in remuneration tax told us the scheme was “unbelievably bad”. Yet a KC – identity currently unknown – provided an opinion that the scheme worked. Just as KCs have done for the dozens of prior contractor schemes.
The contractors using the schemes never see the KC’s opinion. They usually don’t even realise they are avoiding tax – they’re presented with complex and often deliberately opaque documents to sign, and never told what’s going on. If they were told what was really going on, most of them would walk away.
The whole business is corrupt. It plausibly costs the UK £1bn+ in “avoided” tax and leaves workers facing liabilities they neither understood nor expected. The KCs are facilitating what is realistically tax fraud, and what they should know involves the deception of the individual contractors.
The behaviour of this handful of KCs has been public knowledge for at least fourteen years, but nothing has been done. It’s time for the Bar to confront the small number of rogue barristers whose false tax opinions are enabling fraud. And if the Bar won’t act, Parliament should.
Glossary
KC
A senior barrister appointed as King’s Counsel. In tax avoidance schemes, promoters often use a KC’s written “opinion” as a badge of credibility and (they claim) protection against criminal scrutiny.
Written legal advice from a KC (a “KC opinion”) or a junior barrister.
Common in a normal commercial context, but abused for tax avoidance schemes, providing assurance that a scheme is lawful, even where the underlying facts and law make that implausible.
A person or business that designs, markets and runs a tax avoidance scheme (often through a corporate vehicle), typically taking a fee from the “tax saving”.
A company that employs agency workers and operates payroll for them (PAYE), typically sitting between the worker and the end client. Some umbrellas are used to run avoidance/fraud schemes.
Arrangements designed to pay what is, in substance, earnings via something else (often loans), to avoid income tax and National Insurance. Specific anti-avoidance rules target these structures.
Disclosure of Tax Avoidance Schemes: rules requiring certain marketed avoidance schemes to be disclosed to HMRC early, so HMRC can respond quickly (including by issuing scheme reference numbers).
The General Anti-Abuse Rule: a rule that can counteract tax advantages from arrangements that cannot reasonably be regarded as a reasonable course of action (the “double reasonableness” test).
The modern approach to interpreting tax legislation by looking at the purpose of the statute, not just literal wording. This makes technical avoidance arguments less likely to succeed.
A High Court judgment was published just before Christmas which encapsulates the problem. It concerns an “umbrella company” called Purity Limited.
Umbrella companies
Before the 2000s, people wanting to undertake agency work signed up to a recruitment agency. These days, for reasons that are not entirely clear1, many recruitment agencies have no workers on their books. Instead, the workers are hired by an “umbrella company”, each of which has hundreds or thousands of employees. The end user will be a legitimate business (say Tesco). When Tesco wants to hire temporary workers, it approaches a recruitment company. The recruitment company then asks an array of umbrella companies to bid to provide workers, and usually picks the umbrella company that provided the lowest bid. The umbrella then sorts out admin, and applies PAYE income tax/national insurance.
Here’s how that umbrella company should work:
From Umbrella Co. to Worker (Label: Net salary)
From Recruitment agency to Umbrella Co. (Label: Fees)
From End User to Recruitment agency (Label: Fees)
From Umbrella Co. to HMRC (Label: PAYE tax & NI)
There’s nothing improper about this structure; but the incentives the whole setup creates are inherently dangerous. The reason: the bidding process. There should in theory be little difference between the bids the various umbrella companies put in to the recruitment company: each umbrella company is paying market wages (often minimum wage), operating PAYE, and has administrative costs and wishes to make a profit. There is not much room for one company to underbid another – there’s only so far administration and costs can be squeezed.
But there is another way: don’t pay the tax. In some cases it’s just simple fraud: the umbrella companies invoice the recruitment company for the wages plus tax, pay the wages to the employees, and never pay the PAYE tax to HMRC:
From Umbrella Co. to Worker (Label: net salary)
From Recruitment agency to Umbrella Co. (Label: Lower fees)
From End User to Recruitment agency (Label: Lower fees)
So a much smarter way to commit fraud is to dress it up as tax avoidance. Claim to have a structure that means that the employees’ remuneration isn’t taxed, and so you can lawfully not pay the PAYE tax to HMRC. The same result as the simple fraud, but with the distinct advantage that, when you’re caught, you can say it’s only a civil tax dispute.
The end user (e.g. Tesco) will have no idea this is going on, and increasing businesses are taking steps to try to police their supply chain – but it’s not straightforward.
These were highly paid workers – about £50/hour (so around £100k/year).
10% of the workers were paid normally.
The rest were paid the minimum wage as a salary; the rest of their remuneration was provided as a “loan” from Purity.3 The claim was that the loan wasn’t taxable; therefore significant tax and national insurance was saved – about £30k per worker per year. Around half of that “tax saving” was retained by Purity as a fee; some of it went to the workers (it’s unclear how much); it’s likely some of it was passed to the recruitment agency that hired Purity, i.e. with Purity charging a lower rate for the worker that it otherwise would.
Purity paid part of its earnings into a Dubai-based pooled investment scheme – the idea was that investment returns would take this to a point where employees’ loans could be repaid (although application of scheme funds for this purpose was discretionary).
In other words:
From Umbrella Co. to Worker (Label: Minimum wage)
From Umbrella Co. to Worker (Label: Untaxed "loans")
From Umbrella Co. to Dubai fund (Label: £ to invest)
From Recruitment agency to Umbrella Co. (Label: Fees)
From End User to Recruitment agency (Label: fees)
From Umbrella Co. to HMRC (Label: PAYE and NI only on minimum wage)
The consequences
None of the remuneration tax specialists we spoke to thought it had any prospect of success, for these key reasons:
The employees could choose whether or not to take their remuneration in the form of a “loan”. If an employee is entitled to the full amount as earnings, and merely elects to receive part of it in another form, the amount remains earnings from employment. So this was straightforwardly remuneration. 4 No further analysis is required.
The structure doesn’t make any sense. No rational employee would agree that, instead of being paid by their employer, they take a loan, regardless of what extra-contractual assurances are made about the unlikelihood of the loan being called (and a “discretionary” fund that might or might not help repay the loan would not be very reassuring).5 Hence the “loans” can’t, realistically, have been loans at all. Either the arrangement was a sham or the “loans” were, in substance, remuneration.
The investment scheme introduces an additional tax problem: the “disguised remuneration” rules likely apply both at the point money is placed into the fund, and the point it’s applied for the benefit of the employees. In reality, HMRC had no need to apply the disguised remuneration rules, because the remuneration was taxable on general principles (and there’s a rule that generally prevents a double charge). But in the (highly implausible) scenario where the scheme worked and the investment fund was correctly funded/structured, there would be both up-front tax (on the initial contribution to the investment fund) and tax when funds were distributed to employees.
Since 2013, the UK has had a “general anti-abuse rule” – the GAAR. The GAAR applies only where a scheme can’t reasonably be regarded as a reasonable course of action to take – the “double reasonableness test“. The GAAR has in practice never been applied by a court or tribunal, because almost every tax avoidance scheme of the last 20 years has failed in the courts on the basis of specific tax rules or general principles.6 However, in the very unlikely event that the Purity scheme survived the problems above, we expect that it would be countered by the GAAR.78
The scheme was required to be disclosed to HMRC under “DOTAS” – rules requiring that avoidance schemes are disclosed at an early stage to HMRC, so that they can counter them. Purity simply ignored DOTAS. We can see no proper basis for this.
One respected senior tax KC (not involved in these schemes) described the Purity structure as “incompetent and impossible”. A senior tax lawyer specialising in remuneration tax told us it was “unbelievably bad”.
We are therefore not in the traditional tax avoidance scheme territory of an attempt to find a loophole. The structure simply fails.
In many areas of law, it’s useful to have an opinion from a barrister that you have a decent argument, even if he or she thinks that ultimately a court will probably not agree with it. A 30% chance of winning litigation worth many millions of pounds is often worth taking. However, when designing a tax structure, you can’t proceed on that kind of basis. It is only proper to submit a tax return if the position taken is “more likely than not” correct.9 If, on the other hand, you think that there is a more than 50% chance that your position is wrong, and you file a tax/PAYE return anyway – without disclosing the issue – then in our view you are potentially in the territory of criminal tax fraud (“cheating the revenue“). It follows that the scheme’s lack of technical merit is very serious.
Then there is the added element of deception – the “loans” that were not really loans. Deception as to a factual question is a very common basis for tax fraud prosecutions.
Other elements of the structure suggest criminal offences may have been committed.
Employees were misled or misinformed about the nature of the arrangements (presumably because they would have been alarmed if they’d realised that, whatever assurances they were being given, they’d be in serious financial/legal jeopardy when the loans fell to be repaid). It is a criminal offence to intentionally and dishonestly make a false representation with the intention of making a gain.
The sole shareholder of Purity claimed she didn’t know she was a shareholder. If that’s true, then somebody may have filed a false document with Companies House, a criminal offence. If not true, the shareholder may have committed perjury.
The investment scheme could never have repaid the loans. Purity made £45m of loans in one year but had contributed only £470k to the investment scheme. There was no realistic prospect that investment returns would enable the scheme to eventually repay the loans. The employees were misled.
All of this suggests to us that the Purity structure was dishonest in its design and implementation.
But, according to the Purity High Court judgment, Purity was advised by a KC:
We understand that the people behind Purity received a KC opinion confirming that the scheme worked – despite everything suggesting that it wouldn’t. In our view, that opinion was false.
The KC opinion
We don’t believe any reasonable tax adviser would think this scheme works. Indeed any reasonable tax adviser would know that any remuneration scheme of this nature would fail. As tax barrister Patrick Cannon says, it was clear to advisers from (at the latest) 2010 that anyone engaging in a disguised remuneration scheme would be acting contrary to the intention of Parliament (and that rarely ends well). HMRC said back in 2017 that HMRC would challenge users of these schemes, investigate their affairs and apply the GAAR.
So how could a KC provide an opinion backing the structure?
We haven’t seen the Purity opinion, but the opinions we have seen have all followed this approach:
Make unrealistic assumptions that eliminate the rules/principles that would otherwise undo the scheme. For example, the KC could assume that the loans have real substance and the parties expect them to be repaid (via the investment fund). Any experienced lawyer should know this cannot be the case: no rational employee would replace normal remuneration with a loan they’re required to repay, with vague assurances about future discretionary payments from an investment fund they know nothing about. A moment’s thought reveals that properly funding the investment scheme would require more cash than Purity had.13
Ignore tax principles which would defeat the scheme. Over time, and particularly since the early 2000s, the courts adopted a purposive approach to the interpretation of tax statutes. As a result, almost no14 tax avoidance schemes have prevailed in court in the last 20 years. The avoidance scheme opinions we’ve reviewed deal with this by simply not mentioning the courts’ modern approach to construing tax statutes.
Take extremely technical and narrow approaches to interpreting the relevant tax rules – a task made much easier by ignoring the way in which courts actually approach statutory construction.
Ignore other tax rules that might apply: for example the GAAR or DOTAS.
Ignore the potential fraud of third parties involved in the scheme. The KC would surely know that an employee who fully understood the loan would not enter into the arrangement. The KC should have realised the investment scheme would not be properly funded. The obvious conclusion: the scheme users were being misled.
You can see an example of such an opinion in our investigation of a different umbrella scheme backed by an opinion from Giles Goodfellow KC.15 That scheme was, in a different way, just as outrageous as the scheme here, with unrealistic assumptions, no analysis of caselaw or inconvenient rules, and it also involved putting unrepresented individuals in legal and tax jeopardy.
These opinions are “false” in the sense that, if the scheme comes before a court, it will almost certainly fail. The KC surely knows this, given the history of tax avoidance schemes in the last 20 years.
Most lawyers go out of their way to not issue incorrect opinions. Quite aside from ethics and professional pride, there are obvious adverse consequences: an angry client, and potentially a negligence claim. However a scheme promoter is very unlikely to be angry when their scheme fails – they expected it. The opinion was for a very specific purpose: to provide cover against the possibility of criminal prosecution.
So do these KCs issue false opinions?
This is a psychological rather than legal question, but in our view it’s a mixture of bad incentives (fees for issuing the opinion; no downside when the opinion turns out to be wrong)16 and arrogance (“my view of the law is correct; the courts just keep getting it wrong”).
Chartered accountants, chartered tax advisers and solicitors are prohibited from facilitating abusive tax avoidance schemes, because their regulators require them to adhere to the Professional Conduct in Relation To Taxation (PCRT). Barristers are not. This is an anomaly it is hard to justify. However, it means that the small number of barristers17 issuing these false opinions believe they are untouchable.
How do the promoters respond?
There are very few cases of umbrella companies, or indeed anyone, defending their scheme before a tribunal. The users of the scheme generally rely on the promoter to liaise with HMRC, and their aim is to delay and frustrate HMRC, not to provide substantive responses. What tends to happen is that HMRC issue a “stop notice” and/or a DOTAS notice, and the companies respond with delaying tactics and frivolous arguments.18
The umbrella companies mysteriously have enough money to run these delaying arguments (sometimes including expensive judicial reviews) but, once those arguments fail, usually run out of money, and become insolvent, never defending the scheme itself. In fact we’re unaware of a single case where one of these remuneration schemes has been defended before a tax tribunal.
The point of the delaying tactics is to keep the money rolling in for as long as possible. Purity avoided tax on over £45m of remuneration, retaining a fee of £9m which it paid to its shareholders – but by the time it was put into liquidation, it had almost no cash – owing HMRC £26m:
In Purity, things were a little different. HMRC used a new power under section 85 of Finance Act 2022, which enables HMRC to present a winding up petition against the promoter of a tax avoidance scheme where a scheme doesn’t work and HMRC believe that it’s in the public interest for the promoter to be wound up. Purity is the first time that power has been used.
Purity played the usual game of delaying tactics. It commenced an appeal against HMRC’s assessment but then dropped it. It commenced a judicial review in 2024 to try to halt, or at least pause, HMRC’s section 85 proceeding. Judicial reviews are expensive undertakings; Purity seems to have had no problem funding multiple applications and appearances. However after the judicial review failed, Purity was left to go insolvent, and it ended up not defending the section 85 application. Another company running the same scheme, Alpha Republic, played the same game.
This list currently has 165 entries (dating from 202219); around 50 are being added every year. If every scheme is responsible for a similar tax loss to Purity, that implies (very approximately) about £1bn every year – and these are just the schemes identified by HMRC.
The figure may be higher. We’ve spoken to informed sources within the “remuneration scheme” world who estimate several billion of tax is lost every year.
We’ve spoken to people at HMRC who believe these schemes could be one of the reasons for this:
Note how the large business and medium business tax gaps have fallen significantly over the last twenty years. The small business tax gap has risen, with a dramatic change from 2017/18 – representing billions of pounds of lost tax revenue. One plausible explanation for at least some of that increase is remuneration schemes (which are essentially being misclassified as small businesses). More on this here, with links to the underlying HMRC tax gap data.
Ending whack-a-mole
Currently HMRC is playing “whack-a-mole“. A promoter starts a scheme. Usually within a year, HMRC discovers the scheme and starts to issue a DOTAS number and/or a stop notice. The promoter employs the usual delaying tactics and, when these eventually fail, they wind up the company and move onto the next one. The individuals controlling these schemes are unknown to the public and often unknown to HMRC – they increasingly use stooges as directors to hide their identity.
None of this should be permitted. Aside from the lost tax, it’s harmful to the workers who get caught up in the scheme, and it wastes considerable HMRC and court/tribunal resources.
The Government published a series of proposals in the Autumn Budget aimed at promoters, with the intention of ending “whack-a-mole”. Most significantly, HMRC will be able to issue a “universal stop notice”, making promotion of particular schemes a criminal offence (currently stop notices have to be issued on a per-promoter basis). There will also be a general criminal offence of promoting tax avoidance schemes that have no realistic prospect of success.
However we fear that promoters will attempt to escape these rules by obtaining opinions from compliant KCs.20
The game will only truly end when barristers face professional and/or legal consequences for issuing knowingly or recklessly false opinions:
The Bar Standards Board could make clear that it is a disciplinary matter for a barrister to provide an opinion which facilitates a tax scheme that has no realistic prospect of success. Specifically, where the barrister recklessly or knowingly makes key factual assumptions that he should have realised are probably untrue, or recklessly or knowingly adopts arguments that have no realistic foundation, it breaches a barrister’s core duty to act with honesty and integrity.
In cases like Purity, HMRC could use its information powers to obtain copies of the KC advice, applying the iniquity exception from legal privilege.21 If the advice is improper, HMRC could pass it to the Bar Standards Board.22
In suitably serious cases, HMRC could prefer the barrister for prosecution for tax evasion. Barristers have beenprosecuted for tax evasion before – but, as far as we’re aware, that was always for their own taxes. We’re not aware of any case of a barrister being prosecuted for facilitating tax evasion by a client. The standard view is that an insuperable difficulty is that the KC’s advice is privileged. In cases like Purity, we believe prosecution should be considered. The scheme is either fraud or close to fraud – so there are grounds to believe that the iniquity exception from privilege applies (an argument which HMRC have successfully run in other, very similar, contexts).23
Jolyon Maugham wrote about this problem fourteen years ago. He’s not alone – many barristers, and many tax barristers24, are appalled by what their colleagues are up to. But nothing has changed. If the Bar Standards Board can’t or won’t act, Parliament should.
Thanks to the remuneration tax experts who provided their insights on the schemes, legislation and caselaw, particularly T, B and V. Many thanks to M for alerting us to the case, to K and B for advice on the FSMA aspects, and to P for their privilege expertise. Thanks most of all to our sources in the recruitment world.
Footnotes
By which we mean: there is a clear advantage in terms of circumventing/avoiding/evading tax and other legal obligations, but no clear bona fide reason for these structures. It’s not apparent why the law and public policy should permit these types of vehicles to exist. ↩︎
This figure isn’t in the judgment. We’ve estimated it as £45m of loans representing 80% of the remuneration of 90% of the workers implies £63m of total remuneration. If the workers were paid £50/hour then the number of workers = £63m / (£50/hour x 2,000 hours x 21/24 of a year) = 720 ↩︎
The judgment says the loans were interest-bearing – it’s not clear how this worked. ↩︎
This should probably be viewed as a drafting/structural error by Purity, albeit an extremely bad and obvious one. Perhaps it was required for marketing reasons as a way of reassuring employees who were nervous about the “loans”? ↩︎
That is why the “traditional” loan schemes involved a loan from a trust – the employees could be reassured that the trust had their interests at heart and wouldn’t in practice just demand repayment of the loans. These reassurances were in many cases false – the trust absolutely could demand repayment of the loans (and some have). But no legal reassurance at all can be offered when the employer is the lender. ↩︎
A hypothetical scenario in which we’d get to this point would be a realistic investment scheme structure, a series of artificial structural elements which take it out of the disguised remuneration rules, and a court/tribunal deciding that it can’t take a purposive approach to the rules. None of this is very plausible. ↩︎
It is probably permissible to file on the basis of a lower standard provided full disclosure is given – but none of the schemes we’ve seen involve any disclosure to HMRC. There is an excellent summary of the caselaw in this article by David Harkness, now a tax tribunal judge. ↩︎
HMRC appears to have made this point in passing. See paragraph 3 of the 2024 hearing. And note the stringency of the test – “wholly for the purposes of a business” where the loan is less than £25k (which monthly advances will have been), or “wholly or predominantly” in other cases. ↩︎
Note that, without this, it is possible that the loans would be regarded as remuneration for tax purposes but still as loans for general legal purposes – that’s an unjust result for the workers, but a consequence of courts being more reluctant to apply a “substance over form” approach to contract law than they are to tax law. The loan being unenforceable is a good result for the employees. It also adds an additional argument (not that it’s needed) for HMRC that the “loans” aren’t really loans at all. ↩︎
Note that it’s no defence to say that Purity retained discretion over whether any investment returns would in fact be applied to repay employees’ “loans”. The statutory test is not whether participants have a legally enforceable right to a distribution, but whether the purpose or effect of the arrangements is to enable persons “taking part” to participate in or receive profits or income arising from property. Here, the scheme was presented as a pooled investment intended (at least in principle) to generate returns which could be applied for the benefit of a defined class of UK workers, by meeting liabilities said to be owed by them. That is sufficient to bring the arrangements within the scope of s235, even if the operator retained discretion as to whether and when any payments were made. ↩︎
i.e. because if we assume Purity’s profit was around £12m, then even if Purity used all of it (!) to fund the investment scheme, and even if we ignore the employee’s interest payments, the investment scheme would need a 9% return for 15 years for the £12m to grow to £45m. ↩︎
There are perhaps two exceptions: the SHIPS 2 case, essentially because the legislation in question was such a mess that the Court of Appeal didn’t feel able to apply a purposive construction, and D’Arcy, where two anti-avoidance rules accidentally created a loophole. Both pre-date the GAAR. ↩︎
We are not saying that Mr Goodfellow is the KC who provided the opinion for the Purity structure (we’ve no reason to think he was – we don’t know currently who the Purity KC was). ↩︎
Another factor, particularly for the older KCs, is that their practice failed to adapt with the times. Back in the 1990s, many or even most of the top tax barristers and law firms had highly lucrative practices advising on tax avoidance schemes (although rarely called that; “structure finance” was a common term). A combination of new legislation and new judicial approaches meant that, in the early 2000s, it started to become clear that these schemes were becoming less and less likely to succeed. That pressure only increased over time – then the financial crisis, and the media and political focus on tax avoidance, ended the market almost completely. Most tax barristers (and solicitors) moved away from advising on these schemes (or, in some cases, retired) because the prospect of success were so poor, and well-advised clients wouldn’t go near them. For whatever reason, a small number of barristers did not, even though the legal prospects of the schemes were now extremely poor. These “old hands” have now been joined by a small number of younger barristers (generally their former pupils). ↩︎
Numbering fewer than a dozen, and all men. They are mostly KCs but some junior barristers are involved ↩︎
Before that date, HMRC was only permitted to publish names/schemes for twelve months. ↩︎
For example, the draft universal stop notice legislation has a “reasonable excuse” defence. Promoters will claim that they acted in accordance with a KC’s advice, and that was a reasonable excuse. The draft legislation attempts to prevent this by saying that the defence is not available if legal advice is unreasonable, or not based on a full and accurate description of the facts, but if advice is privileged then HMRC will have great difficulty applying this exception. ↩︎
The iniquity exception applies if documents come into existence as part of, or in furtherance of wrongdoing (including, but not limited to, crime and fraud). In our view, these schemes fall within the scope of the exception even if they do not amount to fraud, because the exception extends to underhand conduct which is contrary to public policy. (see the Al Sadeq case). If HMRC has difficulty establishing that the iniquity exception applies, then a specific statutory exclusion from privilege should be created for advice facilitating tax avoidance schemes which fail the GAAR “double reasonableness” test. ↩︎
The iniquity exception applies if documents come into existence as part of, or in furtherance of wrongdoing (including, but not limited to, crime and fraud). The exception extends to underhand conduct which is contrary to public policy. In our view, these schemes fall within the scope of the exception (see the Al Sadeq case). ↩︎
Tax barristers have told us about instances where they’re approached for an opinion, particularly on DOTAS, and they say the opinion can’t be given. The client then goes elsewhere – and frequently to one of the KCs this article concerns. ↩︎
The flagship policy is being widely reported as a cut in income tax1 for low earners, by increasing thresholds from 2026/27. The 20% basic rate will now start at £16,538 instead of £15,398. The 21% intermediate rate will now start at £29,527 instead of £27,492.
This is a very peculiar tax cut. I have four quick thoughts, and an interactive tax calculator showing the effects:
A very small tax cut
The impact looks like this:
A taxpayer earning £15,398 or more receives a small tax cut – £6.02 at £16,000, rising to £11.40 at £16,538 (i.e. because that’s 1% of the difference between £16,538 and £15,398).
A taxpayer earning £27,492 or more receives an additional tax cut – £5.08 at £28,000, rising to £20.35 at £29,527 (1% of the difference between £29,527 and £27,492).
Everyone earning more than £29,527 gets the full benefit of both cuts, i.e. £31.75.
This may be a contender for the smallest income tax cut in history. The previous record holder was the Australian $4 per week tax cut of 2003, widely mocked as a “milk and sandwich” tax cut. The £212 “marriage allowance” introduced by the Cameron Government runs it a close second. The £31.75 cut beats both handily – it’s 61p per week. The amounts are so small that for some small businesses, the time/cost of recoding people’s taxes will be more than the tax they will save.
It’s not a tax cut
The benefit of the tax cut is undone by “fiscal creep” – the freezing of personal allowances and tax thresholds at a time of relatively high inflation (just over 3%). That pushes the low paid over the personal allowance, and others into higher tax brackets.2
This is a much bigger effect than the “tax cut”. If we just look at the personal allowance, to keep up with 3% inflation, the threshold should have risen from £12,570 to £12,947. It didn’t rise at all – and means that, in real terms, everyone earning £12,947+ is worse off by £72. The “tax cut” means there’s no fiscal creep in 2026/27 for the basic rate and intermediate rate band threshold, but there is for the other band thresholds.3
So in real terms nobody is receiving a tax cut. The real effect of the Scottish Budget is that the income tax increase from fiscal creep is slightly reduced.
Across the whole UK, fiscal creep amounts to a tax increase of £30bn/year. The cost of the Scottish tax cuts is £50m – it’s an irrelevance in fiscal terms.
The benefit goes to higher earners
This is being positioned as a “tax for low earners”, but most of the benefit goes to higher earners. Of the £50m overall cost of the tax cut, about two-thirds will go to the highest earning 50% of taxpayers. That’s because all of the top 50% receive the full £31.75 benefit, but many lower paid taxpayers receive nothing or only £11.40.4 We shouldn’t overstate this, because the amounts involved are so very small. But given the tax cut is symbolic, it’s fair to ask why the symbolism is so odd.
It’s – obviously – all about politics
Given these oddities, why bother to implement a tax cut at all?
The Scottish Government’s Tax Advisory Group (of which I am a member) had no involvement in the decision-making process. This was an entirely political measure.
It’s likely the purpose is to enable the Scottish Government to say that everyone earning the Scottish median income of £31,136 (or less) will pay less tax in Scotland than in the rest of the UK. That had always been their aim, but inflation/wage rises meant it ceased to be true in 2023/24 and probably 2024/25. So the very slight nudge to thresholds is intended to ensure that (at current projected median earnings) the median earner in Scotland pays about £24 less tax than someone on the same earnings elsewhere in the UK (and someone earning less than £29,527 about £40 less). This is, however, very dependent on median earnings. Higher than expected inflation/wage increases will reverse it, as happened in 2023/24.
The real difference is for higher incomes. Someone earning £50k pays £1.5k more tax; someone earning £100k pays £3,300 more. That means, overall, Scotland raises about £1bn of additional tax which (broadly speaking) funds additional social and education expenditure. That’s a perfectly valid political choice and, it seems, a popular one. But I’d prefer it was presented more frankly, without gimmicks like “tax cuts” that aren’t tax cuts at all.
The tax calculator
Our interactive tax calculator starts by showing the comparison between Scotland and the rest of the UK. You can also opt to see the change caused by the Scottish Budget, but it’s almost invisible on the chart.
There’s a guide to how to use it in our Budget analysis here, which also discusses marginal tax rates: what they are, and why the UK marginal rates are so unfortunate.
Code
The code for the calculator is available here. If you want to experiment with different rates, you can download all the files and run “index.html” locally. You can then edit “UK_marginal_tax_datasets.json” and add different scenarios.
Footnotes
Note that this is for income tax on wages; income tax on savings/dividends remains at the UK rates and thresholds; a somewhat irrational quirk of devolution. ↩︎
Scotland has no power to change the personal allowance per se, but it could effectively increase the personal allowance by creating a small 0% rate (with additional changes at the top end to roughly mimic the £100k personal allowance clawback). This would broadly amount to the same thing in economic terms. ↩︎
Note that the IFS presents figures for the value of the tax cut in real terms; ours are in cash terms. ↩︎
A simple back-of-the-envelope calculation: HMRC data shows that, in 2022/23, 9% of Scottish taxpayers paid the starter rate. They save nothing from the tax cut. 38% paid the basic rate – most will save £11.40. Then 35% paid the intermediate rate – most will save £32. 18% paid the higher/top rate – all of them will save £31.75. So the weighted saving of the bottom 47% is c£9; the weighted saving of the top 53% is c£32. So about 78% of the benefit would be going to the top 53%, if earnings were the same as in 2022/23. Wages have of course risen significantly since then, pushing many taxpayers in the bottom 50% into higher bands – that’s bad news for them overall, but means they receive proportionately more of the benefit of the tax cut. Overall we estimate that around 60-65% of the benefit will end up going to the top 50%. ↩︎
Samuel Leeds is a self-proclaimed “property guru”. He makes substantial sums by using hard-sell tactics and conspiracy theories to sell expensive courses on property investment to people who can’t afford it. Mr Leeds makes an array of claims on social media about how to “pay zero tax” and “learn the tax loopholes that the rich use“. We’ve reviewed these claims, and many are simply wrong. One is particularly egregious: the idea that you can repeatedly buy a dilapidated property, refurbish it and sell it, and claim main residence capital gains tax relief each time. Mr Leeds says he’s used this “strategy” himself multiple times. But the strategy doesn’t work – there are rules that specifically prevent it. If Mr Leeds really used the “strategy” then it wasn’t clever tax planning, but a failed attempt at tax avoidance – and he may owe significant tax to HMRC.
Mr Leeds claims tax expertise beyond most accountants. The reality is repeated, basic errors. That raises an obvious question about everything else he sells.
It’s a simple claim: that you can buy a run-down property, renovate it, sell it – and the sale is exempt from capital gains tax. Mr Leeds says he’s done this “multiple times”.
This is not a one-off. Mr Leeds makes the same claim in this video, saying you can “continue to do this again and again, completely tax free”:
And here:
And again here, here (in a video entitled “how to avoid capital gains tax”), here, here, here.
The idea that “the rich” move into uninhabitable houses to save tax is obviously daft. However there’s a bigger problem.
The legal reality
The main residence exemption is in sections 222 and 223 of the Taxation of Chargeable Gains Act 1992. This requires that a property is your “sole or main residence”. That’s an immediate problem for the Leeds scheme because, as the First Tier Tribunal said in the Ives case:
“The cases on the meaning of “residence” make it clear that there is a qualitative aspect to the question whether a person is occupying a property as a residence. This would lead us to conclude that a person who sets out to live in a property only whilst working on and subsequently selling it, and who has no real intention of making the property their settled home, is almost certainly not occupying the property as a residence.“
So the basic answer is that the Leeds scheme simply doesn’t work, because you may be living in the property, but it’s not your “main residence”.
There’s a further problem – a specific exclusion from the exemption in section 224(3) of the Taxation of Chargeable Gains Act 1992:
By his own admission, Mr Leeds’ purpose for acquiring the properties was to realise a gain. So, even if each of the properties was his “main residence” (doubtful), section 224(3) applied and he should have paid capital gains tax.
That’s not the only way this goes wrong – repeated acquiring, renovating and “flipping” of properties may constitute a property development trade2, if the acquisition was for the purpose of renovating and “flipping”.3 If it does, then the profits are taxable to income tax rather than capital gains tax – a higher rate, and no main residence exemption.4
None of this is very obscure or difficult, and in our experience the law is widely understood by property investors.
We can see only one case where Mr Leeds warns people that in fact the main residence exemption is not available if you buy with the intention to sell.5 So, given he knows this, why does he say everywhere else – very clearly – that you can use the exemption in such a case?
Other claims
Mr Leeds makes a variety of other tax claims:
Trusts
For most people, trusts are not good tax planning. Putting property in trust (above the £325k zero rate band) is a lifetime chargeable transfer giving rise to an immediate 20% inheritance tax charge. The trust is then subject to an inheritance tax “anniversary charge” of up to 6% of the trust’s asset value every ten years (again above the £325k zero rate band).6 There are lots of people selling trust schemes which supposedly avoid these taxes – the schemes we’ve reviewed do not work.7
IHT planning
Here’s another claim from Mr Leeds:
This is another strategy that doesn’t work. If you continue to live in your house after gifting it to your kids, then the “reservation of benefit” rules apply, and inheritance tax applies as if you hadn’t given the house away.89
Holding UK property offshore
And here’s Mr Leeds claiming last year that someone living in Monaco pays no UK tax on UK property income:
In this video, Mr Leeds suggests that your company can employ your spouse or your kids (from as young as 13 years old), pay them £12,500 each, and so extract cash from the company tax-free.11
HMRC may also challenge this as a diversion of the owner’s income. The usual approach is to deny a corporation tax deduction where the payments are not wholly and exclusively for the trade, and/or to treat the payments as the owner’s remuneration in substance. In some cases HMRC may also invoke specific anti-avoidance rules, including the settlements rules.
Stamp duty and VAT on “uninhabitable” properties
This video makes two misleading claims about saving tax when buying uninhabitable properties:
First, an incorrect explanation of the stamp duty12 rule for uninhabitable properties:
For example, let’s say you buy a rundown house for £150,000 as a buy/refurbish/refinance or a flip investment property. Normally, as a second property, an investment property, you’d pay 5% [stamp duty] on the first £250,000. That’s £7,500 cash up front in stamp duty tax. But because the property lacks a kitchen, bathroom, or heating, it qualifies as uninhabitable. So you pay zero stamp duty up to the first £150,000 and then just 5% on any excess amount, saving you £7,500. The key is getting a RICS surveyor to confirm that the property is uninhabitable.
This is not correct. The “uninhabitable property exemption” (strictly the question of whether a property is “suitable for use as a dwelling“) will only apply in unusual cases. HMRC guidance at the time was clear:13
A very high proportion of the SDLT repayment claims that HMRC receives in relation to this area are wrong. Customers should be cautious about being misled by repayment agents into making incorrect claims.
Whether a property has deteriorated or been damaged to the extent that it no longer comprises a dwelling is a question of fact andwill only apply to a small minority of buildings.
If the building was used as a dwelling at some point previously, it is fundamentally capable of being so used again (assuming there is no lack of structural or other physical integrity preventing such use). Such a building is likely to be considered “suitable for use as a dwelling”, even if not ready for immediate occupation at the time of the land transaction.14
It follows that a surveyor’s opinion on the current condition does not mean that the exemption applies.15 The fact that (for example) a property temporarily lacks a kitchen or bathroom, or doesn’t have heating, doesn’t mean it’s not a dwelling.
Second, a misleading explanation of VAT:
Let me explain how VAT reclaim on renovations works. If you’re about to renovate a property, this next law could save you thousands in VAT value added tax savings.
If a property has been empty, like many have for two years or more, you qualify for a reduced 5% VAT on renovation costs instead of 20%. For example, say you buy a rundown house that’s been vacant for a few years, you budget £100,000 for the refurb, normal VAT will be 20%, which is a £20,000 tax bill. But the reduced VAT at 5% is just £5,000 meaning you’re saving £15,000. And to qualify for this relief, all you have to do is prove the property was empty with council tax records or utility bills, and then work with a VAT registered contractor to apply the discount.
The 5% rate for renovation of empty properties applies to building materials and works to the fabric of the building. HMRC treat several common refurbishment items as standard‑rated, including the erection/dismantling of scaffolding, professional fees (architects/surveyors/consultants), landscaping, hire of goods, and the installation of goods that are not ‘building materials’ (for example carpets or fitted bedroom furniture). In practice someone undertaking a £100k refurbishment will almost never qualify for the 5% rate on all of it.
Wear your brand
Here’s Mr Leeds saying that you can buy clothing with your branding and claim a tax deduction:
This is poor tax planning. You’re unlikely to get a tax deduction because the clothing isn’t “wholly and exclusively” for the purposes of the business. Worse, clothing is usually a “benefit in kind” and so taxable for employees – i.e. potentially a worse result for an owner-managed business than if you paid yourself a salary and used that to buy the clothes.
The strange thing is that the video above is from Autumn last year. But five years earlier, Samuel Leeds said that he’d tried claiming a deduction for branded clothing and it didn’t work:
“My clothes. I tried it. I tried getting my clothes tax deductible, and putting my name on it and stuff. Didn’t get it past HMRC. So I was, like, forget it.”
The Samuel Leeds course
Samuel Leeds markets a course on how to “protect your wealth and legally avoid property taxes”.
It costs £995. That’s a lot of money for generalised advice that doesn’t relate to your particular circumstances – it’s unlikely there’s anything here that couldn’t be found free on the internet. And if the course reflects Samuel Leeds’ view of “tax loopholes” then we expect that much of it will be wrong.
The money would be better spent on specific advice from a qualified adviser.
What if you’ve used any of these schemes?
If you’ve used any of the “strategies” outlined above then we’d recommend that you speak to a qualified tax adviser as soon as you can. That usually means from someone at a regulated firm (accounting firm or law firm), and/or with a tax qualification such as STEP, or a Chartered Institute of Taxation or Association of Tax Technicians qualification.
Don’t speak to HMRC until you’ve received professional advice. Keep copies of all the material you relied on (videos, course notes, messages) and a timeline of what you did and when – your adviser will need it.
Conspiracy theories
Mr Leeds promotes his tax strategies and courses using false conspiracy theories about tax and HMRC.
This video claims that the World Economic Forum has a “plan to seize your home” and wants to “own everything and take your house in the process”. This is a conspiracy theory based on a misreading of a short 2016 essay by a Danish MP: “Welcome to 2030: I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better“. It was a speculative thought experiment by a single author – not a policy proposal, plan, or WEF programme. The WEF itself has explicitly stated that the article does not reflect its agenda and that (rather obviously) it does not advocate abolishing private property.
Another video is entitled “HMRC WILL come for YOU in 2026”, and claims that the “new”16 procedure for “direct recovery of debts” means that, if HMRC think you owe them money, they can simply take the money from your bank account. That is not correct: the procedure applies only to debts that are already due and legally established – typically after HMRC has undertaken an enquiry, closed the enquiry concluding that the taxpayer owes tax, and the taxpayer has either not appealed, or any appeal has been concluded. It doesn’t bypass enquiries or disputes; it comes after them. There’s an excellent overview in this House of Commons Library briefing. The video concludes by promoting Mr Leeds’ other video which he says will help you learn ways to potentially bring your tax bill down to zero.
We don’t know why Mr Leeds promotes conspiracy theories that just a few minutes’ research reveals have no factual basis.
Mr Leeds initially tried to defend his claims. As John Shallcross, a stamp duty land tax specialist, pointed out, Mr Leeds was citing cases he didn’t understand.
In response, Mr Leeds accused tax advisers of “gatekeeping”:
We asked Mr Leeds for comment before publishing this story and asked, specifically, if he really had – as he claims – “flipped” properties multiple times and claimed the CGT main residence exemption. He refused to comment, instead giving us a generic denial:
The post you have shared describes a high level example of a principal private residence strategy. It is not a statement that repeated property trading would be exempt from tax regardless of facts or intention.
I have not unlawfully failed to pay capital gains tax. Any suggestion otherwise is incorrect.
I do not provide personalised tax advice and I do not advise people to engage in unlawful behaviour. As you know principal private residence relief depends on individual circumstances and intention which cannot be determined from a short social media post.
If you intend to allege unlawful conduct by me personally you will need to provide evidence to support that claim. Otherwise I expect that allegation to be removed from any publication.
I will respond publicly once your article is published.
The problem with Mr Leeds’ “high level example of a principal private residence strategy” is that the strategy simply does not work. If you intend to acquire, refurbish and sell properties, then case law and legislation mean that the main residence exemption will not apply. It’s not about the detail and intention – the basic concept is a failure.
If Mr Leeds’ claim is true, and he really did acquire, refurbish and sell multiple properties, then in our view he should have paid capital gains tax or income tax. If he didn’t, then that suggests tax was underpaid – it’s “failed tax avoidance“. Of course it’s also possible that Mr Leeds exaggerated, and he either hasn’t used this approach at all, or he has exaggerated (for example, because it wasn’t a deliberate strategy at the time, and he didn’t intend to sell the property). He’s certainly exaggerating when he claims “the rich” use this strategy – it goes without saying that “the rich” do not in fact repeatedly move into unliveable houses to save tax.
Mr Leeds repeatedly says he’s not qualified to give tax advice and viewers of his videos should speak to an accountant. That’s no excuse for proposing “strategies” that don’t work. It’s also undercut when he says things like this:
This level of confidence is dangerous – particularly when his courses seem targeted at people on low incomes who may not be able to afford an accountant.
Our view is simple: it’s deeply irresponsible to market tax “loopholes” that don’t work. Mr Leeds claims to know more about tax than most accountants. Yet the examples above contain repeated, basic errors. If this is his “tax expertise”, readers can draw their own conclusions about the rest of his courses.
Many thanks to K and P for help with the tax analysis, to Rowan Morrow-McDade for his original LinkedIn post, and to John Shallcross for his invaluable assistance with the SDLT aspects of this report.
There were similar comments in the Mark Campbell case:
“Having considered all of the evidence, cumulatively, I find that the Appellant did not intend that any of the properties would be his main residence. This is because the evidence before me does not support a finding that there was any degree of permanence, continuity or expectation of continuity in relation to any of the properties. In reaching these findings, I have considered the nature, quality, length and circumstances of any occupation relied on.“ ↩︎
In Ives, it was not – there were successive purchases, renovations and sales, but the Tribunal accepted evidence that each purchase was intended to be a permanent residence, but for various reasons Mr Ives later had to move house. ↩︎
The usual HMRC practice is to run trading and section 224(3) arguments in the alternative. ↩︎
And note that the reference to “income tax” here is also wrong – possibly Mr Leeds is conflating the trading rules with section 224(3). ↩︎
Subject to exemptions like business property relief, which in principle applies to shares in a trading company. However such exemptions also apply if the assets/shares are held directly; the trust is not creating the exemption. ↩︎
One particular variant that’s sometimes marketed uses the employee benefit trust rules, as EBTs in principle aren’t subject to inheritance tax. However EBTs are intended for employee remuneration; using them primarily to benefit participators/owners attracts intense HMRC scrutiny and specific anti-avoidance rules. We are not suggesting Mr Leeds uses an EBT. ↩︎
In principle you can gift your house to your kids and then continue living in it, with your kids charging you a market rent; that’s often an undesirable outcome, particularly as the rent will be taxable for your children. ↩︎
However you did give the house away as far as capital gains tax is concerned, meaning that this “strategy” doesn’t save inheritance tax, but can result in an increased capital gains tax bill for your children. ↩︎
And if you use a letting agent they’re required to withhold tax when paying you, unless you obtain approval from HMRC to be paid without withholding and then file a self assessment. ↩︎
i.e. because he’s claiming the salaries are tax-deductible for the company, but below the personal allowance and so not taxable for the kids. ↩︎
The tax in question is “stamp duty land tax” (SDLT). It’s almost always called “stamp duty” in popular discourse, but “stamp duty” is actually a completely different tax. With apologies to tax advisers, we’re going to use the term “stamp duty” in this article to avoid confusing laypeople. ↩︎
The video was posted in March 2025. The source to the YouTube page includes the metadata: “itemprop=”datePublished” content=”2025-03-09T10:00:25-07:00″. ↩︎
This reflects case law. Five months earlier, the Mudan case had confirmed that the scope of the uninhabitable exemption is very limited (and this was then upheld by the Court of Appeal in June 2025). ↩︎
Mudan is clear that you can’t form a judgment based on a “snapshot”. ↩︎
It’s not new. Direct recovery of debts came into force in 2015, was paused as a result of Covid, and resumed in 2025. ↩︎
Back in June we reported on perhaps the strangest firm we’ve come across – “Offshore Advisory Group”.
Offshore Advisory Group recently rebranded as Gibraltar Corporate Partners.
Offshore Advisory Group promoted itself by pushing extreme political commentary, including conspiracy theories originating in Russian propaganda outlets. It used the attention this attracted to sell a tax avoidance scheme that supposedly let UK businesses escape UK tax by incorporating in Gibraltar. We obtained copies of a structure paper prepared by Offshore Advisory Group – it made a series of fundamental errors, and proposed a structure that simply didn’t work.
Offshore Advisory Group’s response to this, on its official LinkedIn, was rather unusual:
That was widely criticised; OAG responded by deleting the post, and then posting another accusing every accountant and tax adviser in the UK of “acting out of self-interest”.
Following the adverse publicity, Offshore Advisory Group appears to have changed its name to Gibraltar Corporate Partners. The Offshore Advisory Group website redirects to a new Gibraltar Corporate Partners website, with most of the old content removed, but the same false claims that businesses can avoid tax by moving their invoicing entity to Gibraltar:
The Offshore Advisory Group LinkedIn account was renamed to Gibraltar Corporate Partners, with all the old content still there and still referring to the old name (the original post was deleted soon after we posted this article). The same people seem to be involved. They’ve responded in the comments below1, denying that they promote or advise on tax schemes (which is odd, given that their website and structure paper show that they do promote and advise and tax schemes ).
Given their history, we would strongly advise against dealing with Gibraltar Corporate Partners. Our general recommendation has always been that, whether for looking advice in the UK or abroad: only ever deal with regulated firms.
Many thanks to John Holt for spotting the change of name.
Footnotes
We’ve confirmed by email that the comments are genuinely from GCP/OAG. ↩︎
We’ve modelled the impact of the English “mansion tax“1 by analysing land registry data on every property transaction since 1995. This lets us estimate how much each postcode and Parliamentary constituency will pay. It’s an approximate and lower-bound estimate – see methodology details below. As property taxes are devolved, there’s currently no mansion tax in Wales and Scotland – although I rather expect there will be soon.
This interactive map shows the results of our model, marking every postcode that contains “mansion tax” properties. It also shows English and Welsh data2 on the current council tax bands, median house prices, and the changes in house prices since 1995 (which demonstrate quite how out of date council tax is):3
You can view the map fullscreen here. It’s important to stress that this is only showing postcodes – the markers on the map are at the centre4 of the postcode and do not represent individual properties.
This chart shows our estimate of the revenue from the mansion tax for each constituency. You’ll be unsurprised to see that most affected properties are in London (you can move the mouse over individual constituencies to see full details).
My view is that the tax is good policy. There will be inefficiencies and unfairnesses, as with all taxes, but the basic concept is right: ending the anomaly that someone in a £10m home pays the same council tax as someone in a £1m home – and only twice the council tax of someone in a £400k home. I wrote more about my views here.
This chart shows how the “mansion tax” makes council tax somewhat more progressive:
It would be technically straightforward for our analysis and map to show the estimated value and mansion tax for individual properties, but we were uncomfortable with the privacy implications (although there are many property price websites that let you see “price paid” data for specific properties). We therefore limit the map to postcodes (which has the side benefit of making the app load and respond much faster).
Our very simple approach has obvious limitations:
The open Land Registry data doesn’t include title numbers or other identifiers for properties. So we have to “de-duplicate” repeated transactions in the same property, so we only count the most recent. This is error-prone and we err on the side of conservatism – we’ll therefore be missing some properties.
The open Land Registry data also doesn’t differentiate between residential and commercial. We use the “Property Type” field which says whether a property is detached, semi-detached, terraced, flat/maisonette or “other”. In principle, “other” should be commercial property and the other types should be residential – but there will be numerous cases where this isn’t so. For example a farmhouse sold with the farm may be classified as “detached” and so caught in our data as if the full price related to the house, when realistically it won’t.
Inflation is higher in some areas within a constituency than others
We can’t take account of improvements etc to properties, conversions (e.g. where a property is split into flats), and any other changes after a sale.
Our approach completely ignores properties that haven’t been sold since 1995.
In some cases (particularly high value property) the price is hidden, or too low.
Portfolio transactions are another problem – e.g. where multiple low value properties are acquired for a large £2m+ price, but no separate price is registered for each property. In that case the land registry sees each property as a £2m+ sale, and we end up with multiple false identification of “mansions”. We try to fix this by identifying when there are multiple purchases on the same postcode on the same date for the same price – but this won’t catch all such cases (e.g. where a portfolio transaction spans multiple postcodes). There isn’t an easy way to fix this.
Taken together, our approach is likely generating a lower-bound estimate of the actual static revenue from the tax. The total estimated revenue is £510m.6
This is much less than the OBR’s static revenue estimate of £600m – that will be because they used more sophisticated approaches, for example more granular house price inflation corrections, better detection of residential property, inclusion of properties that aren’t in the transaction data. The OBR then adjusts the static estimate to reflect behavioural effects (clustering below thresholds) and losses to other taxes – this brings their total estimated revenue to £400m.
So our figures, and our map, are missing properties and undervaluing properties, and that together amounts to an error of about 20%. We make no attempt to adjust for behavioural effects. So none of the figures we present will be individually accurate, but the overall picture should be an accurate reflection of the constituencies and postcodes from where the “mansion tax” revenues will come.
Strictly the “high value council tax surcharge” or HVCTS. ↩︎
Unfortunately it’s limited to England and Wales – the Scottish data is separate. ↩︎
Much worse in England than Wales, because England is still on the original 1991 valuations, but Wales revalued council tax in 2003. There was a huge amount of house price inflation in the 1990s. ↩︎
Strictly it’s the address-weighted centre, not the geometric centre. ↩︎
i.e. labelled as detached, semi-detached, terraced or flat/maisonette. Almost all of those are residential. Some of the other category (“Other”) will also be residential, but we’ve no way to screen those using only land registry data – typically one would use a commercial database to cross-check. Government/local authorities can of course use council tax/business rate records. ↩︎
The original version of this article said £400m. We’ve since improved the algorithm; it’s better at removing repeated transactions in the same property (i.e. because we only want to take the most recent). It’s also now using change in median detached house prices per constituency, rather than change in all median house prices. Detached houses are likely a better proxy for change in value of very expensive homes. ↩︎
Here’s our summary of the Budget and a quick take on what the various measures are likely to mean.
(The first draft of this article appeared unusually early, thanks to the OBR accidentally publishing their assessment of the Budget about half an hour before the Chancellor started her speech.)
Key elements
It’s all about fiscal creep:
The overall impact is one of the largest medium-term tax rises in recent years – £30 billion a year by 2030/31:
Three measures do most of the work.
First, that “fiscal creep”. Since 2018, successive Chancellors have let tax thresholds become eroded by inflation. The IFS said in 2023 that this was the largest single tax-raising measure since 1979, but after two years’ of further creeping, the OBR’s latest estimate is that fiscal creep will raise £32bn in 2026/27 and £39bn in 2029/30. This is likely the largest overall tax increase from a single policy in the post-war period.1
This means median earners have been paying a bit more tax (but less than before the personal allowance was cut in 2011), and many more people have become higher rate taxpayers (paying quite a bit more tax):
Second, salary sacrifice is being capped to £2,000. We may see this exacerbate the “bumps” in the income distribution, where people can currently use salary sacrifice to stay under thresholds that result in high marginal rates:
Third, a slight surprise: an increase in income tax on investment income – property, savings and dividends. The political attraction is obvious, and the Chancellor sensibly didn’t put up the top (additional) rate of dividend tax. That’s probably because UK dividend tax is already one of highest in the world. Look at the top of the arrow tails on this chart:
There’s a nice infographic in the Budget documents showing how the different rates of basic rate income tax now look:
Basic rate dividend tax is therefore (taking corporation tax into account) no at the “right” rate – and additional rate dividend tax already was.
All these measures are back-loaded:
Fourth, a significant HMRC compliance package, which the OBR seems to accept will materially reduce the tax gap:
My immediate reaction is that it’s fair that expensive houses pay more council tax. The current system is inequitable – a tax that looks like this can’t be defended:
It would have been much better to revalue council tax and add more bands. Given that is seen as politically too hard, the Government instead created a new tax working off a fresh valuation basis:
The oddity is the limited number of bands. That probably makes valuation easier, but means there is a sharp discontinuity at the boundaries (and so lots of appeals around the £2m point) and that £100m properties don’t pay more than £5m properties. So the curve created by the new tax is an improvement, but still looks a bit odd:
Economists usually assume that an annual property tax is “capitalised” into prices – buyers factor in the future stream of payments. On that basis, a £7,500 annual charge cuts the value of a £5m property by perhaps £200k to £300k, i.e. 4-6%. However that’s if people are rational calculating machines – obviously they are not. Stamp duty on a £2m property is £150k; on a £5m property it’s £500k. These ridiculous numbers are why stamp duty should be abolished and replaced with an annual property tax. But their sheer size means buyers may not regard the prospect of £2,500 to £7,500 annual taxes with enormous trepidation.
The tax will apply from April 2028. It will be collected by local authorities (together with council tax), with the revenue going to central Government, and central Government compensating local authorities for the admin cost.
The tax doesn’t raise much – £400m. That was the correct decision. A “proper” percentage mansion tax would have had a much more serious impact on the property market. It would also have been unfair to people who happen to own property today, as they would have taken the hit (with the economic effect rather like one-off tax on property wealth). We absolutely should have a proper percentage-based property tax, but that has to be part of wholesale reform, meaning abolishing stamp duty. Having both would be inequitable, and do damage to an already very troubled property market.
Sixth, what is I think a sensible introduction of a mileage tax for electric cars:
There’s a consultation document – the tax will be a new kind of tax for the UK, and that always takes time to design and build. Perhaps sugaring the pill, a consultation on allowing EV charging to be installed across pavements (safely) without planning permission.
Seventh, a reduction in capital gains tax relief for disposals to employee ownership trusts. This was a measure intended to encourage employee ownership. It has been abused in some quarters – and costs much more than originally anticipated.
Eighth, a reduction in writing-down allowances, which allow businesses to claim tax relief when they buy capital items. There’s “full expensing” (immediate complete tax deduction) for plant and machinery, but some items don’t qualify, and must be written off over time (perhaps the most important example is second-hand/used plant and machinery). This change slows down the rate. It will therefore (at the margin) reduce investment in such items.
Closing the loophole that meant that some taxi firms (think: Uber) paid a lot less VAT than they should. This will be portrayed as a “taxi tax” but it’s really just fairness and common-sense – all taxies should have the same VAT rules.
As expected, closing “low value consignment relief”, which exempts imports of £135 or less from customs duties. The intention was always to avoid disproportionate duty and administration charges. The problem is that the relief has essentially been weaponised by the likes of Shein, making UK retailers uncompetitive.
The expected expansion of the higher air passenger duty for private jets, to include large private jets as well as smaller ones.
The Energy Profits Levy (or “windfall tax”) to remain in place until at least March 2030. I expect it will in reality become a permanent feature of the tax system.
A consultation on letting elected mayors introduce tourist taxes. The question is how much they will adversely impact the already-under-pressure hospitality sector. Will be writing more about that soon. The (obvious) lesson of the council tax second home surcharge is that local authorities are so strapped for cash that they will maximise any opportunity they have to make additional revenue, regardless of the merits of the tax.
Changes to the sugar levy, intended to reduce the amount of sugar in drinks – it’s not immediately clear if this will raise additional revenue.
The overall result: by the end of the decade, the UK tax take hits 38% of GDP – the OBR says that is an “all time high”.
Tax cuts
There were a few:
A temporary three year holiday from SDRT/stamp duty on shares for new listed companie. No details yet. It’s good to see focus on this – stamp duty is a damaging tax, and higher than the similar taxes imposed by comparable countries. But I’m sceptical it will be effective. Investors and companies look further out than a few years.
As announced in last year’s Budget, a reduction in business rates for retail, hospitality and leisure businesss, paid for by an increase in business rates for businesses with larger properties (including, but not limited to, the warehouses used by the likes of Amazon).
The Budgets we were never going to see
Quite a lot of complaints are from people expecting Budgets we were never realistically going to see. Three types in particular:
A Budget that cuts spending.
The Spending Review was in June and it seems unlikely any of those decisions will be re-opened. The attempt to find £5bn of welfare savings was a failure, with Labour MPs and much of the public opposed. Whilst many politicians are in favour of generic spending cuts and “efficiency savings”, it’s much rarer to find anyone active in politics (as opposed to think tanks) committed to a specific programme to constrain or even shrink the size of the state.
A Budget that raises income tax
The kind of Budget I and other tax wonks and economists would prefer: where any immediate “black hole” and need for fiscal headroom was resolved with transparent increase in income tax. Every economist I’ve spoken to, Left or Right, believes this would be the least damaging tax increase.
Most of the attention during and after the Budget will be on the big tax-raising measures. But there are an unusual number of important other items, which appear technical, but will impact everyone from billionaire non-doms to the poorest people in the country. None of these items are likely to be mentioned in the Budget speech, but will be buried somewhere in the mountains of paper that accompanies it.
This could be the Budget measure with the greatest long-term impact.
Jeremy Hunt made the decision to move from domicile to a modern residence-based regime (something we and many others had suggested). Labour took that, and made the additional and politically irresistible promise to close the “trust loophole“.
But there’s a problem. The original Hunt changes ignored a key point: that inheritance tax shapes decision-making by non-doms (and indeed many others) far more than taxes on income and capital gains. Hunt’s reforms had inheritance tax applying in full, at the normal 40% rate, once a non-dom had been resident in the UK for ten years. For many non-doms, paying a bit more UK tax on their dividends and capital gains is not a big deal. But the prospect they could fall under a bus, and then their children would lose 40% of their worldwide assets in UK tax, is a very big deal indeed.
That wasn’t a terribly big point back when Hunt made his proposal, because the – very deliberate – “loophole” meant that the seriously wealthy would keep their non-UK assets in trusts and so avoid inheritance tax.
By abolishing the loophole, Labour made the “bus” problem something that couldn’t be avoided. The OBR estimated that 25% of the wealthier non-doms – those with trusts – would leave the UK. This is why.
Fortunately it’s not too late. Despite some media reports, informed observers generally believe no more than 5-10% of non-doms have left so far.
Points to watch: Will the Budget revisit any of the detail of the non-dom reforms? In particular, will there be a new, gentler, application of inheritance tax, for example gradually applying in stages from year ten to year twenty, rather than applying immediately in year ten?
That sharp uptick in 2019/20 may have initially been caused by the pandemic, but we don’t see that effect for other types of taxpayer, and it’s now clear that the trend didn’t slow down after the pandemic.2 Part of the changes appears to be due to a change in methodology, but most is not.3
There’s a sharp contrast with the large and mid-sized business corporation tax gap, which HMRC have been remarkably successful at closing.
The trend isn’t confined to corporation tax – the overall small business tax gap has also ballooned:4
These effects mean the small business tax gap is now at least £10bn/year higher than it should be.5 The surprising thing is that nobody seems to know why this is – not the team who work on the tax gap calculations, and not HMRC or HMT policy experts. There are several theories – in our view the most plausible is that the trend is driven by avoidance, evasion and non-payment which is technically classified as “small business”, but is really just individuals using companies to avoid/evade tax.
Points to watch: will there be recognition that this is an issue, and an announcement that Government will task HMRC with identifying whether the £10bn represents a real loss and, if so, what should be done to collect it?
3. Promoters of tax avoidance
Many of our investigations have concerned what are often called “tax avoidance schemes”, but which are in reality often little more than scams. The schemes usually have no real technical basis, the promoters usually have no tax expertise, and either HMRC loses out or the clients/victims are frequently left with large tax liabilities (or, quite often, both).
HMRC’s official “tax gap” figures show tax avoidance costing HMRC £700m in lost revenue. I and many other observers (within and outside HMRC) believe this understates the problem, because much “avoidance” isn’t properly avoidance at all, and ends up classified by HMRC as evasion or non-payment. Some of the “missing” £10bn of small business tax is likely caused by these schemes.
The Government published a series of detailed proposals in a consultation back in July – “closing in on promoters of marketed tax avoidance”, creating a range of new civil and criminal powers for HMRC. Most importantly, HMRC will be able to charge large penalties to promoters who fail to disclose tax avoidance schemes to HMRC, and Treasury Ministers will be able to make regulations which, once approved by Parliament, will create a “Universal Stop Notice” making promoting a specified scheme a criminal offence.
The package has been highly controversial in the tax advisory world, with many advisers expressing concerns that innocent (which is to say, non-fraudulent) advisers could end up liable. I am sympathetic to some of these concerns, but others I think are overdone. I hope we’ll see finalised proposals which strike the right balance.
Points to watch: will the key “Universal Stop Notice” and penalty measures be included? Will there be new protections for bona fide advisers?
4. Umbrella companies
Millions of people in the UK work are employed by employment agencies for temporary work. That includes NHS nurses, IT contractors, and often low-paid staff such as warehouse workers. But modern practice is that the biggestemployment agencies don’t actually employ anyone. They act as middle-men between end-users (like the NHS or Tesco) and “umbrella companies”, which actually hire the workers. When an end-user asks the employment agency to provide a worker, the employment agency then goes out to umbrella companies and asks them to bid to supply the worker (in a process that is, inevitably, now entirely automated).
This creates a dangerous incentive. In a country with a minimum wage, umbrella companies should have little ability to compete on price (other than bidding down their own profits). But if they can find a way to reduce the PAYE income tax, national insurance and employer national insurance on their workers’ remuneration, they can bid less, and win the contract.
We have therefore seen a huge number of schemes run by umbrella companies to not pay the tax that is usually due. Our team hasn’t seen a single such scheme which has any legal merit. Some have involved simple fraud – just stealing the PAYE instead of giving it to HMRC. More usually the schemes are dressed up as tax avoidance schemes, with the worker supposedly paid in some bizarre manner (such as via an option over an annuity) that avoids tax. In our view these “avoidance” schemes are in reality also fraud, because the legal positions taken are unsupportable. And in almost all cases when HMRC challenges an umbrella company, it’s abandoned by the shadowy figures running the scheme, goes into administration and the tax is never paid.
The scale of the schemes can be seen by looking at HMRC’s list of named avoidance schemes – almost all are umbrella/remuneration schemes. We’ve spoken to informed sources within the agency/remuneration world who believe that several billion pounds of tax is being lost every year.
Draft rules were published in July which make employment agencies jointly liable for tax defaults by umbrella companies. The idea is a sound one: create an incentive for agencies to police the umbrella companies they work with. The problem is that the proposals create another incentive for bad actors: instead of just controlling umbrella companies, acquire/create recruitment agencies. Then, when HMRC attacks schemes, the recruitment agency will be abandoned, leaving HMRC with no way to collect the tax.
The answer is a draconian one: put responsibility on the end-user – the company actually hiring the worker. Tesco or the NHS in our example above. I’d then expect end-users to put very robust measures in place to ensure the tax is paid (for example paying the tax amount into an escrow account so the agency/umbrella can’t touch it).
Points to watch: Will the measures go ahead? And if they do, will liability be limited to agencies and not the end-users? If the measures are enacted without end-user liability then I expect in practice they will have only a limited effect.
5. HMRC penalties: the impact on the poor
Over the past five years, HMRC have issued around 600,000 late-filing penalties to people whose incomes are too low to owe any income tax at all.6 Far more penalties were issued to people too poor to pay tax than to those in the top income deciles:
This is not a niche edge-case: it is baked into the design of the current regime. Since a 2011 reform, late filing penalties are no longer capped by the tax actually due – so a person who ultimately turns out to owe nothing still keeps the penalties.7 Many low-income taxpayers are brought into self assessment by HMRC error, historic earnings, or very small amounts of self-employment income – over £1,000 a year is enough to trigger the filing requirement8
Things should, in principle, improve – the current penalty rules are being replaced with a new “points-based” penalty regime under which nobody is fined for a first missed deadline and total late-filing penalties are capped at £200.9 But the penalty reforms are part of the Making Tax Digital project, requiring businesses and the self-employed to keep digital records and submit tax information to HMRC electronically. That means the changes will only apply to those with incomes over £50,000 from April 2026, over £30,000 from April 2027, and over £20,000 from April 2028 – and there is currently no timetable at all for anyone below that.10 The Low Incomes Tax Reform Group has described the result as a “two-tier system” in which those on the lowest incomes are left with the old, harsher rules.
This means that, for the foreseeable future, a millionaire landlord filing his tax return late won’t pay a penalty; but his low-income tenant will continue to pay up to £1,600. That’s indefensible, and something no Labour Chancellor should stand for.
The 2000s and early 2010s saw widespread marketing of tax avoidance schemes which disguised pay/remuneration as “loans”. The idea was that, instead of being paid in the usual way (and paying tax) you received loans from an offshore trust (and paid no tax). I put the word “loans” in quotes because they weren’t really loans at all – in most cases there was never any intention to repay them.
HMRC failed to effectively challenge the schemes, and by 2019 there were over 50,000 people using them, and lost tax running to billions each year. There was no way to launch 50,000 separate enquiries, and so in 2016 the Government enacted the “loan charge” – a one-off charge on scheme users which retrospectively undid the benefit of the schemes. We discussed more of the background here.
This has caused considerable hardship. The promoters selling the schemes cared only about their fees, and never told their clients about the risks they were running. So the taxpayers generally spent the tax they were saving. Worse, a high percentage of the tax saving went in fees to the promoters – so recovering the full tax amount now means that taxpayers are being asked to repay amounts that never went into their pocket.
The loan charge has become mired in controversy, with lobbyists often denying that the schemes were avoidance, and seeking for affected taxpayers to escape without ever repaying the tax they avoided. That’s not justifiable.
The outcome of the review will be published with the Budget papers.
Points to watch: a sensible outcome would be to distinguish between the actual cash tax savings made by the scheme users, and the large fees they paid to promoters. The loan charge should only recover the former. Any excess already paid by taxpayers should be refunded. It would also be good to see new measures against promoters, for example giving the scheme users a right to recover their losses.
The source is the HMRC tax gap tables – see tables 5.2, 5.4 and 5.5. ↩︎
The only other taxes where the tax gap has gone up over this period are inheritance tax (which likely results from so many more estates becoming subject to the tax) and landfill tax (we don’t know why that is; it’s an area where our team has no knowledge or expertise) ↩︎
There have been a series of upward statistical revisions to data for recent years. These took the 2022/23 small business corporation tax gap from 32% to 40% (with the 2021/22, 2022/23 and 2023/24 figures being essentially identical). However HMRC sources have confirmed to us that these revisions don’t call earlier figures into question, and so the apparent trend in the data is real, and not just a statistical artefact. ↩︎
This is from table 1.4 of the HMRC tax gap tables. HMRC have generally done an excellent job shrinking the tax gap, with declines across the board. But after 2017/18 something changed. ↩︎
The small business tax gap increased from 2.4% of all UK tax revenues in 2005/6 to 3.2% in 2023/24. The rest of the tax gap fell precipitously over that period – large businesses from 1.7% to 0.7%; mid-sized businesses from 1.0% to 0.5%. ↩︎
See HMRC’s FOI response. An interactive breakdown of the data, and the code used to analyse it, is available here. The underlying calculations are on our GitHub. ↩︎
The modern regime is contained in Schedule 55 to the Finance Act 2009, brought fully into effect for self assessment from 2011/12. Under the previous system, broadly, a late filing penalty could be capped by the tax shown as due on the return (for example under s93 Taxes Management Act 1970), so someone with no liability would not normally end up with substantial penalties once they filed. The Low Incomes Tax Reform Group (LITRG) warned at consultation stage that removing the linkage to tax due would risk “wholly disproportionate penalties” for those with low or no incomes: see their response to HMRC’s 2008 penalties consultation, especially para 4.4.1, reproduced at page 5 of LITRG’s later paper, “Self assessment – a position paper”. ↩︎
See the gov.uk guidance on who must file a tax return. In practice, people can also be kept in self assessment long after their circumstances change unless they (or an adviser) tell HMRC they should be removed: see LITRG guidance and HMRC pages on leaving self assessment. Once HMRC’s computer has issued the notice to file, the penalties roll out automatically if nothing is sent back. ↩︎
The new late submission regime is described in HMRC’s guidance note “Penalties for late submission”. In outline, taxpayers accrue “points” for missed filing obligations; once a threshold is reached, a £200 penalty is charged, but there is no further escalation into the thousands. Points expire after a sustained period of compliance. The rules are legislated mainly through amendments to Schedule 55 FA 2009, alongside the wider Making Tax Digital (MTD) programme. ↩︎
See the government’s technical note on the phased implementation of MTD for income tax, and the announcement of revised timings. ↩︎
![lf you have a property portfolio with 4 or more
properties, did you know it’s possible to:
© Reduce the 40% Inheritance Tax rate to *
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(UR approach
1, Paromita 1 Yam]
2 lncarparation
3 teu thereafter)
4. Share Plann
ha
Ngee FOR SALE](https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/slide_sdlt_partnership.jpg)
![What lop Closers Want Ilo See -
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![In light of the reputational harm caused, which easily passes the threshold of “serious harm” under Lachaux v
Independent Print Ltd [2019] UKSC 27, | require the following steps to be taken within 7 days:
1. Publication of a clear and public confirmation of your sincere belief that | am the leading barrister in the
field of taxation in the country, as previously stated, and a sincere apology for your misleading and disparaging
remarks;
2. Retraction or substantial amendment of the headline and body of the article so as to remove the defamatory
implications it currently conveys;
3. Publication in full of my letter to the Information Commissioner, together with acknowledgment of the
outcome of the BSB investigation;
4. Written confirmation that you shall apply higher editorial standards in the future, and that no further false or
misleading references to any persons will be made in your publications;
5. Undertaking to make the following payment: you shall undertake to pay 80% of any amounts which my
regular or historic clients represent to you, in writing, as amounts they would have paid to me under an
engagement with me, but did not do so because of your publications.
Should you fail to take these steps, | will proceed without further notice to pursue all remedies available to me,
including injunctive relief, damages, and costs.](https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/image-32-2000x994.png)
![18.
However I agree with Mr Callus that I am bound as a matter of law to apply the rule in
Charleston to Mr Kamal’s pleadings. The last two sentences of [4] of his particulars
of claim, whatever he intended by them, read as plainly and irremediably inconsistent
with the rule. I do not consider they can survive a strike-out application. They are bad
inlaw. As such, they disclose no reasonable grounds for bringing a libel claim in those
terms and are certain to fail.](https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/image-34.png)
![31.
In the circumstances, the pleading that it was ‘false and misleading’ to suggest that a
judicial finding of breach of duty had been made against him is incapable of forming a
part of the just disposal of Mr Kamal’s libel claim. The attempt to do so is an abuse of
the court’s processes. I grant the Defendant’s application to strike out [5(b)] of Mr
Kamal’s particulars of claim.](https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/image-36.png)
![34.
35.
Mr Kamal did not engage with the substance of this objection before me. Mr Callus is
undoubtedly right as to the law. To order an apology would be a form of compelled
speech which clearly engages the Article 10 ECHR rights of defendants. There would
have to be an identifiable basis in law for a court to be able to do it. There is none. A
court has no such power.
I grant the Defendants’ application to strike out [14] of Mr Kamal’s particulars of claim
(and the equivalent parts of the claim form). It is bad in law and certain to fail.](https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-12-at-07.58.06.png)
![84.
85.
I have thought particularly hard about this last point because, in his written and oral
submissions to me, Mr Kamal laid great emphasis on his principal objection to the
Article being its association of him with the Arka Wealth scheme it critiques. He says
he did not devise or advise on that scheme, and the Article suggests he did. I can see
that Mr Kamal might have pleaded (I do not necessarily say as to any particular
outcome) not only the generalised meaning he in fact pleaded at [6(a)] but also a factual
allegation setting out that (as he complains) he invented, promoted or advised on a
specific scheme and an associated expression of opinion that that particular scheme was
unlawful or discredited. That would be a worse meaning than he has in fact pleaded,
so there can be no real prospect a court would find such a meaning.
Mr Kamal might have pleaded single natural and ordinary meaning in a number of
respects which are worse than he has in fact pleaded (professionally-advised libel
claimants tend to plead meanings which are as high as they consider plausible short of
extravagance, precisely because they know they set a ceiling on a court’s
determination). A court is meaningfully limited in law by a claimant’s pleaded
meaning. Mr Kamal has made choices about the claim he is asking the Defendants to
address and the court to consider. His pleading of meaning in his particulars of claim
is not technically deficient as such — it does not require remedial amendment in order
to set out a case it would be fair to ask a defendant to defend. But it does delineate the
claim he himself has chosen to advance. I can consider the claim he has pleaded. I
cannot on a summary judgment application consider speculatively different claims he
might have pleaded but did not.](https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/media-XXXXXXXX.QPtl5QAsB4.jpg)
![87.
88.
The first is the point of principle that, their Art.10 rights being engaged, courts ought
not to strive officiously to impute factual allegations to defendants where, informed by
the context of a publication read as a whole and by the ceiling imposed by a claimant’s
own pleading, it is straightforward to recognise that an ordinary reasonable readership
would have no difficulty in understanding they were receiving defendants’ opinions. A
court ‘should be alert to the importance of giving free rein to comment and wary of
interpreting a statement as factual in nature, especially where as here it is made in the
context of political issues’ (Yeo v Times Newspapers Ltd [2015] 1 WLR 971 at [97] per
Warby J (as he then was)). The subject matter of the present Article is not (party-
)political in the narrow sense, but it does avowedly enter the sphere of public policy
debate and law reform. In any event, the scheme of the statutory defences in the
Defamation Act 2013 is itself a recognition of the respect due to free speech in the form
of expression of opinion, the protection of which should not be ‘whittled away by
artificially treating comments as if they were statements of fact’.
The second reason lies in the structure of section 3 of the Act itself. The issue of basis
of opinion is something different from the prior question of fact/opinion, and courts
necessarily have to be careful not to elide the two. It is to the issue of basis of opinion
(section 3(3)) that I turn next.](https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-12-at-08.00.55.png)
![To:
From: Jeffrey Epstein
Sent: Thur 8/13/2009 7:02 12 PM
Subect: Re
he is terrific. ] want it to be his devision . | will stand by and help
all i can,,, for the space he should pur together all the numbers... rental insurance phones. heat.
ete, and then possible rent
On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 2:58 PM, - RE wrote:
Oh dear, he iss confused cos he has focussed hard on busing and renumg out space to give
him independent income ...!
Sent from my BlackBerry & wireless device
Front. Jethrey Epstem
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2009 13:03-15 -0400
To. REINALDO AVILA DA SILVA’
Subject:
please send allthe info if vou intend to got to the osetopay scholl,, tuition needs. financial aid
avalible ete](https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/image-39.png)
![To: Jeffrey Epstein[jeevacaton@gmail com]
From: REINALDO AVILA DA SILVA
Sem: Thur 9/47/2009 4:29 36 PM
Subject: Re Message from Reinaldo (London)
Dear Jefirey,
Hope this finds sou well
Just a brief note to thank you for the money which arrived in my account this moming
Best
Reinaldo
Reinaldo Avila
Osteopath in training
4 Park Village West
London NWI 4A](https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/image-43.png)
![To: jeevacation@gmail.com[jeevacation@gmail com]
From: Jes Staley
Sent: Sun 1/24/2010 4 22 38 PM
Subject! Re Fwd Fw MONITORING PA - DARLING WARNS US OVER WAR ON WALL STREET
You called t
From: Jeffrey Epstein
To: Jes Staley
Sent: Sun Jan 24 10:01:46 2010
Subject: Fwd: Fw: MONITORING PA - DARLING WARNS US OVER WAR ON WALL STREET
CONFIDENTIAL
Date’ Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 9:59 AM
Subject: Fw: MONITORING PA - DARLING WARNS US OVER WAR ON WALL STREET
To: Jecsteation gmat com
Fyi
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device](https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-05-at-20.13.17.png)
![To: Jeffrey Epsteinjjeevacationg@gmail com]
From:
Sent: Sun 3/28/2010 6 48 06 PM
Subject: Re
Tecan say this to him: Fam feeling peculiar and going to have something to eat Do you want to
call at home in half hour 7
Sent from my BlackBerry ® wireless device
From: Jetires Epstein - jeevacation’a gmail com >
Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2010 14 34.57 -0400 ‘
To: PLIER MANDEL SN, SS
Subject:
I would like vou to ask Larry Summers if he would meet directly with Jes, and another jpm
person. re the proposed voleker rule. Fean't do it directly Larn is getting info third and fourth
hand trom senators who are getting it from lobbyists](https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/image-13.png)
![To: yeevacation@gmail com[jeevacation gmail com]
From: petermandel
Sen: Tue 3/30/2010 8 08 15 PM
Subject: Fw
Sent trom my BlackBerry & wireless device
From: Jes Staley
Date: Tuc, 30 Mar 2010 14.26 24 -0400
To: Peter Mandelson [i -
Subject:
Peter, What follows are some brief speaking points that we would use in discussing the Volcker plan
with Summers. We can speak to them when we talk tonight.
The Federal government's guarantee of bank deposits enhances consumer confidence in our financial
system.
Although deposits play a lesser role as a funding source folowing decades of bank disintermediation, it
1s sensible for government (as any guarantor would want) to seek limits on how funds sourced from
their guaranteed deposits are exposed to risk.
Well-managed US banks with prudent controls to protect chent interests, including depositors’, already
do this respecting the intent of existing affiliate restrictions and with internal procedures separating
proprietary and fiduciary activities.
Updating regulation to the reality of global modern markets should not disadvantage U S institutions or
create structural conflicts in relation to their Asian or European counterparts.
Fiduciary: Asset Management
Regulations that protect clent investments from other banking activities have proven successful during
recent financial crises.](https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-03-at-13.38.37.png)
![Jeffrey Seal com]
Wed 3/31/2010 1:26 47 PM
Subject: Re Fw SummersiCX readout
AL [lam tomorrow
Sent from my BlackBerry # wircless device
From: Jetirey Epstein « jeevacation’¢ gmail.com>
Date: Wed. 31 Mar 2010 09-25°35 -0400
To:
ject: Rev Fw: Summers. CX readout
where will the bills language be changed to "may" from shall, - in Dodds markup by amanagers
amendment by Chris Dodd himself or an amendment on floor." are you still scemg LS for
breakfast
On Wed. Mar 31. 2010209. AM, - I ror.
Jamie sa CX. friendly No time for me but he did autograph the book | am reading about
himt
Sent from my BlackBerry « wireless device
From: Jeffrey Hpstein = jas Greet valent
Date: Wed. 31 Mar 2010 09:09:17 -0400
T
Subject: Re Fa: Summers. CX readout
Ownership of hedge tiznds secms of little risk as compared to proprivtary trading. if they were
o limit prop trading wouldnt that be enough. why limic the asset classes to mutual funds in a
complex environment? clients fect more comfortable know ing that the bunks are giving the
biessing lo certain alternative investments they will merch go offshore with no oversight
right in the uks lap. On another now did tony sce farey or jamiv .2 i know you asked to see
jamie is it mportant to you”
On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 3 9-03 AM, {I co:
Welcome any other fine tuned questions to him
Sent from my BlackBerry wireless deview
Fram: Jeffrey Epstein jeccucitt ro paar oem
Date: Wed. 31 Mar 2010 08:48°43 -0400
1
EFTA_R1_01496514
EFTA02427379](https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/hedge-funds_Page_1.jpg)
![To: Jeffrey Epsteinjjeevacation@gmail com]
From:
Sent: un 5/9/2010 10 14 50 PM
Subject: Re
Just leasing NolQ. will call
Sent fromims BlackBerry ® wireless device
From: JeHrey Epstem : jecsacation’¢ gmail com *
Date: Sun. 9 May 2010 18 13°20- 0400
Subject: Re:
are you home
On Sun. May 9.201030 520 PM, I ot
Sd be announced tonight
Sent fromm BlackBerry & wireless device
From: Jettres Epstem iets a a eer
Date: Sun, 9 May 2010 Ve 3016 0400
To: PrT?R MAND? $0’
Subject:
sources tell me $00 b cure bailout , almost compelte](https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/euro-bank-bailout.jpg)
![To: Jeffrey Epsteinjeevacation@gmail.com]
From: David Stern
Sent: Wed 2/10/2010 6:07:25 PM
Subject: Re: EMI
My friend is the right hand man to Guy Hands, boss of Terra Firma, the EMI owner.
Ihave a meeting scheduled with him for Friday.
Tomorrow [ will speak to fnends at morgan stanley and ingenious media (media focused
corporate finance yroup) who apparently have followed this situation quite closely.
In my view Ibis too early to get Mandelson involved before 1 know morc. It scems that the debt
mountain is too big, covenant breach is imminent and citigroup want to take control.
On 10 Feb 2010, at 18:01, Jeffrey Epstein wrote:
who ts your friend.. 1 am interested. Do we necd help -mandelson?
On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 3:57 AM, EE wrote:
Troubled industry but related to P:
EMI (music) necds approx USS 190m to sunive or may be taken over by Citigroup.
Terra Firma own EMI, my friend is in charge of this investment.
Should | talk to them ?](https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-03-at-14.35.55.png)
![To: Jeffrey Epsteinjeevacation@@gmail com]
From:
Sent: Fri 9/10/2010 10 32 25 AM
Subpect: Re
And meet a nice rich chinaman and live happily ever after talking of which, have you
permanently stopped the Reinaldo sub?! | may have to put him out to work on the streets
Sent from my BlackBerry ® wireless device
From: Jeftres Epstein - jeevacation‘’a gmail com >
Date: Fr. 10 Sep 2010 06.12.55 -0400
To: PLIER MAND! SN i
Subject: Re
after dancing with everyone at the party, hopetullly you will take someone home STAY . you
should move there for two years and associate with JPM. [ts a home run](https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-06-at-23.13.54.png)
![To: jeevacation@qmail com[jeevacationg@gmail com]
From: PETER MANDELSON
Sent: Sun 4/4/2010 9 31:40 PM
Subyect: Fw Nal
Hope Jes can send warm response to this informal email...
--- On Sun, 4/4/10, PETER SIANDELSON
From: PETER MANDELSON -
Subject. Nat
1 ee —
Date: Sunday. 4 April, 2010, 22:30
Jes,
I've been following my friend Nat Rothschild's plans to list a vehicle on the LSE
and i'm very happy that JPM are now planning to get involved as book runners
alongside CS. i think it's a great idea from what | see of the global mining business
(and their prices).
| hope it all goes well.
best Easter greetings to you and the family
Peter](https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-08-at-21.54.39-1.png)
![To: Jeffrey Epsteinfieevacation@gqmail com]
From:
Sent: un
Subect: Re
Think has to be bye GB
He has now gone to church !
Sent trom ms BlackBerry ® wireless device
From: Jettrey Fpstein - joes acation‘’y gmail.com:
Date: Sun, 9 May 2010 05:31:41 -Q400
Subject: Ke:
bye.bye smelly?
on Sun, Mey 9, 2010 « +10 1 SS ......
GB absolutel determined to forge ahead. Wants to know shat E want personally - stay in UK
or go back to Europe?
Sent from my BlackBerry &® wireless device
From: Jettrey Epstem = jectacae is ovaib cent”
Date: Sat. 8 May 2010 20:01:20 -0400
Subject:
jess view is that you must be seen as a statesman, and not a personal -man. of gh, supporting eb
will be seen as bad form commercially, he has lost the confidence of the public, jpm is vers
voncemed that the pound could be the next currency to falter. and big time. uncertainty 1s not
in Sour favar.](https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/image-12.png)
![Jettrey Epstein[ieevacaton@gmail com]
PETER MANDELSON
Mon 7/12/2010 11 34.28 AM
Re
really, what was that 7?
read the limes
- On Mor
12/7/10, Jeffrey Epstein wrote:
From. fetliey Epstein jeevacationi gmail.com
Subject: Re.
To
Date, Monday
July. 2010, 12.33
F enjoyed the guardian spot
On Mon. Jul 12.2010 at oS 4M, - i ot:
Have you seen Times seral and new online + today *
Seat from my BlackBerry ® wireless device
From: Jefltey Fpstein ¢y..5 ws bot
Sum. Ti Jul 2010 1eeS3$3 -0400.
itis only in the begining. do nol Jet others know, you will take away all our negotialoin
posture
On Sun, Jul 11, 2010 at 4.24 PM. iii:
That wasn't DB offer, It was | plus an end sear share which may be 2-5
Sent from my BlackBerry # wireless device
From: felfiey kpstein io) Go ty mat vem
Date: Sun, 11 Ju 2010 15°S4-47 0200
Subject: Re
db s offer was | million but with a 4-10 million total., DO NOT CONFIDE other offers
sith Tim.
On Sun, Jul 11, 2010 at 341 PM, PETER MANDELSON
EFTA_R1_01479021
EFTA024 10312](https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/underselling-and-ask-for-a-job_Page_1.jpg)
![To: jeevacationg@gmail comijeevacationg@gmail com]
From:
Sent: Thur 7/8/2010 2 14 37 PM](https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/upload_cc17703a-efbf-423f-b478-086b01cca81d.jpg)
![To: yeevacation@gmail com{jeevacation@gmaii com]
From:
Sent: Tue 12/21/2010 9 55 32 AM](https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-03-at-20.09.41.png)
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HOME » NEWS » UK NEWS » ‘THE ROYAL FAMILY
Mystery over Jeffrey Epstein’s meeting with a Labour
minister The Telegraph ~,
Fi Caxncps Own = 4,4M owatynap
Asenior Minister in Gordon Brown’s Government arranged a meeting with
convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein while he was being held under house
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arrest at the end of an 18-month jail term.
The Royal Family Oo (>)
News » USA»
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Disabled great- Elderly wombat
in The Royal Family grandfather denied rescued after being
stairlift and forced to attacked
crawl
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Joining forces: Harry e
in the US Sponsored
When media meets
medicine
Jeffrey Epstein
The Telegraph
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By Jason Lewis, Robert Mendick and Jacqui Goddard
in Florida
9:00PM GMT 12 Mar 2011
Surpassing Victoria:
33 fun facts
The disclosure comes in the wake of the controversy over the Duke of
York’s close friendship with the disgraced financier. in December, the
Duke was photographed walking through central park with Epstein
following his release from jail, triggering demands for him to quit his post
as the UK’s Special Representative for International Trade and
Investment.
Sponsored Features»
A court transcript raises new questions about the reach of Epstein’s power
and influence.
The legal documents reveal that Epstein applied to a US judge for special](https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/image-23.png)
![To: jeevacationg@gmail comieevacation@gmail com]
From: Peter Mandelson
Sen: Sun 11/7/2010 2 34 57 PM
Subject: Fwd Rio apartment
Sent to my bank manager Gratetul for helpful thoughts from my chiet ite adviser
Sent from ms 1Pad
Beuin tonvarded message
From: Peter Mandelson Po :
Date: 7 November 2010 14 29 12 GMI
Subject: Rio apartment
as we discussed, | am considering a purchase of an apartment in Rio It isin
a block under construction in [panema [tis being re-sold off plan bs the onginal
purchaser Asking price ts § 350 000 nals | am told that this value will rise on
construction and will follow Rio property prices up in coming sears
Tcan forward property details to vou m nest few dass but | would be grateful for advice
trom sou on how HSBCPB in Rio can assist in helping me take the decision on
this particular property and ina purchase [also need some advice on tas
mplications in Brazil and UK
Lam minded to place ownership, once secured. in Reinaldo’s name and advice on this
would also be welcome
Please let me know whether and how sou can help on this
Best regards from Beying
Peter
Sent from my iPad](https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/upload_73f957b3-5d51-4d36-9449-a9bef95c2947.jpg)
![To: jeevacation@@gmail com[jeevacationgggmail.com]
From: PETER MANDELSON
Sent: Wed 12/1/2010 10:07:26 PM
Subject: Fw: Re: Rio apartment
I cannot tell you how nervous this makes me. Going to bed now
On 24 Nov 2010, at 16:34, EE wrote:
Peter,
| am pleased to confirm that | now have approval to provide you with a loan on the following headiine
terms:-
Borrower You
Amount £1.68m
Purpose Assistance with purchase of holiday home in Rio
Term 5 years
Repayment £24,000 per quarter
Security Mortgage over 4 Park Village West
Valuaton The property wall be valued by one of the bank's panel valuers, at your cost.
We require a minirnum valuation of £2.4m
Interest 2.25% over 3m LIBOR - 1. approx. 3% p.a. at the present time. This 16 a
discount to our revised standard pricing of 2.5% margin, and unfortunately | am unable to reduce tt
further
Fee 0.75% (£12,600)
Other For the duration of the facilty, it1s a conditon that you maintain a maumum credit
balance with us of £100.000
Please advise iffhow you wish to proceed. As you may recall, from the end of this week | will be on
holiday untd 13th December, but Sam will be able to take matters forward in my absence.
Regards
HSBC Private Bank
ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR | Media & Entertainment
HSBC Private Bank (UK) Limited, 78 St. James's Street, London. SW1A 1JB](https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/upload_f224aa92-4eca-4653-bdd8-1e8a40477fab.jpg)
![To: jeevacation@gmail.comfjeevacation@gmail.com]: Jeffrey Epsteinfjjeevacation€@gmail.com}
From: Peter Mandelson
Sent: Wed 3/30/2011 3:41:59 PM
Subject: on
A lawyer in Rio has pointed out two problems in Reinaldo purchasing the Rio flat by means of a
cash transfer from me: we would be liable to taxes in both UK and Brazil, and the purchase itself
would be liable for two forms of property taxation in Brazil, 4° and 6°o respectively of the full
purchase price. This would be prohibitively expensive.
The lawyer suggests the following scheme which he has operated for others. He would
buy‘create an offshore company in Panama and this company would open an account with
HSBCPB in London. We would also create a Brazilian company which would have the
Panamanian company as a partner (shares held by Reinaldo and me). The Brazilian company,
managed by Reinaldo, would purchase the flat. The flat purchase would be financed by means of a
loan from the Panamanian company's account in London to justify the offshore (non-taxable)
ongin of the moncy.
The lawyer proposes that | invest US$S0,000 to buy the shares of the Brazilian company (making
a residence permit in Brazil also possible).
The company would be liable for tax at 20 on the property purchase (rather than 4% and 6°o).
The company would have a Brazilian bank account (Safra or HSBC 7). The lawyer would have
power of attorncy to sign legal documents etc.
As directors of the Brazilian company, Reinaldo and | would have joint control over the property.](https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/image-4.png)
![in accordance with
Rules 6.2, 6.3 &6.5 of
the Insolvency (England
& Wales) Rules 2016 and
Sections 95 & 99 of the
insolvency Act 1986.
LIQO2
Notice of statement of affairs
Companies House
For further information, please
refer to our guidance at
www.gov.uk/companieshouse
1 | Company details
Company number
1{1[ol7[s5[ol[sle
Company name in full
Purity Ltd
+ Filling in this form
Please complete in typescript or in
bold black capitals.
2 | Liquidator’s name
Full forename(s)
Edward
Surname
Avery-Gee
3 | Liquidator’s address
Building name/number
27 Byrom Street
Street
Post town Manchester
County/Region
Postcode u [3 | [a [P[F|
Country
4 | Liquidator’s name o
Full forename(s)
Nick
Surname
Brierley
}@ Other liquidator
Use this section to tell us about
another liquidator.
5 | Liquidator’s address @
Building name/number
27 Byrom Street
Street
Post town Manchester
County/Region
Postcode u[ 3 | [4] P| F| |
Country
@ Other liquidator
Use this section to tell us about
another liquidator.
04/17 Version 1.0](https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/upload_156f6b18-95cf-4512-a562-1cdb02374ca6.jpg)
![(3) [F7 sections 223 and 223B] shall not apply in relation to a gain if the acquisition of,
or of the interest in, the dwelling-house or the part of a dwelling-house was made
wholly or partly for the purpose of realising a gain from the disposal of it, and shall
not apply in relation to a gain so far as attributable to any expenditure which was
incurred after the beginning of the period of ownership and was incurred wholly or
partly for the purpose of realising a gain from the disposal.](https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/upload_5b8222f9-5a9b-47d8-bd77-1389fb3a9e84.jpg)
![Oy Samuel Leeds @ t Follow ] vo
"tf @samuel leeds
At the moment, 92% of my real estate is held in the Uk.
My 2030, my goal is for that number to be 60%
As much as | love UK real estate, it’s important to
diversify into different markets.
| have a trust set up to hold them to pass generational
wealth, today I’ve been on multiple viewings and been
putting forward embarrassingly low offers on prime luxury
properties.
Don’t wait to buy real estate, buy real estate and wait }](https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/1720852696714.jpeg)
![Rowan Morrow-McDade {) - 1st
Tax Director at Alexander & Co | Chartered Tax Adviser | Chartered Acco...
PR 30- Edited - ©
"Guru" Samuel Leeds is now sharing property tax advice on Instagram. Let's see
how it stacks up:
"Buy an unlivable house for about £150k that's been empty for over two years.
Because it's unhabitable, you pay no Stamp Duty”
Completely incorrect. The recent Court of Appeal decision of Mudan [2025]
showed that remedial work - however extensive - does not in itself make a
property non-residential. The courts consider whether a building retains the
essential characteristics of a residential property. Only in very extreme cases of
structural disrepair will a property be considered not a "dwelling" for SDLT
purposes.*
"Only pay 5% VAT on refurb costs as the property has been uninhabited for 2+
years"
This is in fact true - but it only relates to structural repairs/renovations. It doesn't
apply to things like carpets or fitted bedroom furniture, or landscaping the
garden.
"Spend around £50k, fixing it up while making it your primary residence. Sell
once finished for around £100k profit, tax free because it's your main residence"
No - wrong again. The Capital Gains Tax exemption for main residences “shall
not apply in relation to a gain if the acquisition of... the dwelling-house ...was
made wholly or partly for the purpose of realising a gain from the disposal of
it"r*
So if HMRC argue that you bought the house to make a profit from it, they will
deny the exemption, giving you a 24% Capital Gains Tax bill on sale. In a worst
case (see the title of Samuel's post "How the rich flip houses") then HMRC can
tax it as trading income at up to 47%.](https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/upload_9e3d3791-6701-4ff8-8952-0948acc49340.jpg)
_(cropped).jpg){kind=link}
