Does the UK promote tax avoidance?

Key points

• The Dukes of Westminster have associated with legally acceptable tax avoidance in various different guises.
• Tax reform to restrict the opportunity for tax avoidance has been legislated with increasing regulation.
• When does legal tax avoidance cross the threshold into unacceptable avoidance?
• The UK government has been complicit in creating acceptable tax planning opportunities which border on the unacceptable.
• Now the UK has left the EU are freeports the next acceptable UK tax avoidance option?

William Somerset Maugham wrote of Monaco ‘a sunny place for shady people’. Now I would venture that the UK is a shady place for monied people. Why?

Tax avoidance continues to attract widespread attention particularly in the UK. In the 1930s the Duke of Westminster case was significant in this regard. The 1933 case concerned Hugh Grosvenor the then Duke avoiding paying income tax by remunerating his gardener by way of covenant. In CIR...