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A professional tax adviser has been convicted of engineering a multimillion tax fraud relating to the abuse of gift aid.
David Perrin, a former deputy managing director at Vantis Tax Ltd, will be sentenced on 9 February after having been found guilty at Blackfriars Crown Court, London, of cheating the revenue.
He devised and operated a tax avoidance scheme that advised more than 600 wealthy clients to invest in four companies he had set up and listed on the Channel Islands Stock Exchange. And he used money from an offshore account to pay people to buy and sell the businesses’ shares to inflate their price from pennies to up to £1 each.
Perrin of Leagrave, Luton, made a total of more than £2 million in commissions from his unsuspecting clients, who donated 329 million of the shares to registered charities and made claims amounting to £70 million of gift aid relief on a total of £213 million of income and company profits.
The ex-Inland Revenue official, aged 46, spent his earnings on a luxury lifestyle of exotic holidays and high-end cars. At a Vantis annual conference, he led delegates in a parody of the Gloria Gaynor song I Will Survive that celebrated the abuse of tax loopholes.
HMRC criminal investigator Jim Graham said Perrin believed he was a step ahead of both the Revenue and the law thanks to his knowledge of the tax system and connections in the financial sector.
‘This cynical fraud not only stole millions of pounds from taxpayers but also conned innocent charities into accepting gifts of virtually worthless shares, just so Perrin could inflate his own criminal earnings,’ said Mr Graham.
UPDATE 8.2.12: Perrin has been sentenced to 18 months in jail.
