Boris Johnson and His Cabinet of Privileged Thugs Seize Office

So it’s finally happened. As just about everyone expected, but nobody outside his circle of the Tory far right actually wanted, yesterday Boris Johnson finally slithered into office. It was already on the cards on Monday, when the papers published this piccie of an expectant, jubilant Boris.

It sounds ridiculous, but I know people, who were genuinely unsettled by this image. They described him as looking mad, possessed even. I think it was probably due to a loathing of the man’s vile personal character and views coupled to his goofy expression. It also struck me that with his eye’s wide and his mouth wide open, there’s a certain superficial resemblance to the expression on this notorious American mass murderer, Charles Manson.

Which means that when they saw the picture of Johnson, subconsciously they saw this:

Which is enough to give anyone the creeping horrors.

Now Johnson isn’t a vile, unrepentant serial killer and cult leader like the late Manson. But he is an obscenely wealthy aristo, who has just appointed a cabinet of similarly obscenely wealthy aristos, none of whom seem to have the old virtues of genuine concern for the poor of the Tory paternalists. Because being ‘wet’ went out with Maggie Thatcher. They also stand for nothing more than their own enrichment and the simultaneous impoverishment of the less fortunate. They are vehemently pro-Brexit, anti-welfare and for privatisation and deregulation, despite the immense harm these zombie economics have done to this country and its proud, fine people. And it hardly needs to be said that they’re also pro-fracking and against the environment.

Two days ago on Tuesday, male feminist and anti-Fascist YouTuber Kevin Logan put up a video, Super Rich F**ks, which exactly described the Tory front bench. It was a piece of musical satire, mirrored from Dirty Little Owl’s channel, which showed images of various leading Tory politicians, with captions showing their personal wealth and a short piece about their horrendous voting record, while a song plays in the background viciously sending them up.

It begins with the statement that the Tories have a combined net worth of £2.4 billion, before going to the following –

Michael Gove

Net worth, £1 million +

Consistently voted against paying higher benefits over longer periods for those unable to work due to illness or disability.

Chris Grayling

Net worth, £1.5 million

Almost always voted for reducing housing benefit for social tenants deemed to have excess bedrooms. (Bedroom tax).

Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson

Net worth £1.5 million

Almost always voted for a reduction in spending on welfare benefits.

Is a massive child.

Theresa May

Net worth: £2 million

While her husband’s £1.1 trillion investment firm avoided UK tax, she cut 2,000 police, raised tax on the self-employed and took benefits from 60,000 disabled people.

Penny Mordaunt

Net work: £2.5 million

Always voted to reduce help with council tax for those in financial need.

Philip Hammond

Net worth: £8.2 million.

Consistently voted against raising welfare benefits at least in line with prices.

Sajid Javid

Net worth: £8.5 million

Almost always voted against spending public money to create jobs for young people who’ve spent a long time unemployed.

Lord Stratchclyde

Net worth: £10 million

Voted against free school meals and milk.

Wryly commenting on the girth of the above aristo, the video comments that ‘clearly hasn’t suffered a want of meals himself.’

Jeremy Hunt

Net worth: £14 million

Here the video quotes his views advocating the destruction of the NHS:

‘Our ambition should be to break down the barriers between private and public provision, in effect denationalising the provision of healthcare in Britain.’

Adam Afriyie

Net worth: £50 million

Voted for reduction in benefits for disabled and ill claimants required to participate in activities intended to increase their chances of obtaining work.

Zac Goldsmith

Net worth: £75 million

Voted in favour of proposed spending cuts and changes to the welfare system in favour of spending on new nuclear weapons.

Lord Deighton

Net worth: £95 million

Voted against protections for pensions being ‘raided’ when the master trust fails.

Jacob Rees-Mogg

Net worth: £100 million

Voted for cuts in Housing Benefits for recipients in homelessness hostels, refuges, sheltered housing and accommodation for people with ongoing support needs.

Richard Benyon – richest MP in the UK

Net worth: £110 million

Voted to set the rate of increase for certain benefits, payments and tax credits at 1%, rather than in line with the increase in prices at 2.2%.

The Marquess of Salisbury

Net worth: £330 million

Receives £250,000 each year of taxpayers’ money for his inherited 10,000 acres, mostly in Jersey.

Lord Ashcroft

Net worth: £1.2 billion.

A tax exile in Belize who has poured millions into the Conservative Party over the years and strongly supported Brexit, which would remove Britain from the jurisdiction of forthcoming tax avoidance rules in the EU.

This bit has a clip from Panorama showing Brexit hiding in the gents’ toilets to avoid having to answer questions on tax avoidance.

I dare say that some of these grotesques are no longer in power, like Theresa May, thanks to Johnson’s massive purge of the cabinet. But those, who have replaced them are pretty much the same. They are what Private Eye once described as ‘the futile rich’. Their only concern is to grab more money for themselves, and steal it from the mouths of the poor.

And the press are complicit in this. Owned by millionaires themselves, they’ve now started a campaign of truly nauseating sycophancy, praising Boris to the rafters. Toby Young even raved about how Boris was a type of ‘Nietzschean superman’.

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/07/tory-propaganda-assault-begins.html

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/07/toby-young-says-gissa-job-bozza.html

And the Beeb enthusiastically joined in last night on the One Show, where one of the guests was his father.

It’s all just Tory lies, one after another. Boris won’t do anything for this country. He doesn’t stand for more investment in the NHS or public services. He won’t put 20,000 more rozzers on the street. But he will privatise the NHS and cut welfare spending like the Tories always have. And Brexit will decimate our manufacturing industry, just as they’re anti-environmentalism will destroy our natural environment.

Get these thugs and hypocrites out now!

Boris, do what you said ought to be done when Blair transferred power to Brown and call an election so we can kick your sorry rear end out of No. 10.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Private Eye on Daily Mail’s Lord Rothermere Purchases Parking Space with Offshore Company

Private Eye in their issue for 20th December 2014-8th January 2015 published an article on how Lord Rothermere’s tax dodging had gone so far that he had actually used an offshore company to buy a parking space in London.

Offshore Ownership
Why Lord Rothermere Is Parking Mad

Daily Mail proprietor Lord Rothermere, also known as Jonathan Harmsworth, appears to go to extraordinary lengths to keep his millions out of the taxman’s clutches. The Eye has discovered that he has even bought a parking space near his Kensington office through an offshore company.

Land Registry data shows that in February 2009 a company called Harmsworth Holdings Ltd bought a 125-year lease on space number 76 at the exclusive underground private car park under York House, just across Kensington High Street from the Mail’s Derry Street offices. The company is registered in St Lucia, 300 miles off the South American coast.

Why Rothermere would need this bizarre arrangement is not clear – he would not comment on the matter to the Eye – but buying assets through offshore companies controlled by family trusts carries big tax advantages for “non-domiciled” taxpayers like Milord Rothermere (see Eyes passim).

The company owning the parking space is considered an overseas asset and remains outside the scope of a “non-dom’s” future inheritance tax bill. And if the parking space was bought out of the ample income received by the Bermudian company and offshore trusts through which Rothermere controls Daily and General Trust plc, there would be no “remittance” to the UK to generate an income tax bill.

The same St. Lucian company also owns land and one further, unidentified property in the Kensington area. Yet another Rothermere company, Harmsworth Trust Co (PTC) Ltd, registered in the British Virgin Islands, owns 10 English properties, most of them near the Rothermeres’ neo-Palladian pile in 200-acre Ferne Park in Wiltshire.

(Most non-doms, incidentally, would lose the inheritance tax break once they lived 17 out of 20 years in the UK. But Rothermere can thank his father for choosing France for his tax exile and thus bequeathing it as his country of domicile, since a longstanding agreement between the UK, and France happily overrides this rule.)

Rothermere isn’t alone in using an offshore company to own 12 square metres of tarmac and a precise 1.9 metres of airspace under York House. Fifteen further spaces – each said to be “large enough to accommodate a Rolls Royce”-have been bought in the same way: five through companies incorporated in the BVI, three in the Isle of Man, two in Liberia, one each in Jersey and Guernsey and a couple of unknown origin.

Rothermere’s purchase was for an unquantified amount, although other spaces bought around the same time went for £100,000, the top price being £149,500. Investors in what is described as “London’s first boutique car park” seem well-pleased. “What a delight,” says one. “Having suffered for many years with the aggravation of trying to find a parking space at night, let alone the frustrated nanny on the school run [sic]. This car park has solved all my problems.”

I’m astonished both at how expensive parking space in the rich areas of London are – £100,000 and over! – and how no purchase seems to be too small or too petty for the Rothermeres and people like them to purchase through offshore trusts. Though if they’re paying up to £150,000 for a parking space, you can see why they’d try a tax dodge. Do they do their weekly shopping at Harrod’s or wherever through offshore accounts? And their bespoke tailored suits – are they owned by them, or similarly the property of a company in the British Virgin Islands or St. Lucia!

From 2013: Private Eye on Complex Corporate Structure and Dodgy Accounting of Private Health Contractor

This is from the Eye’s edition for 22nd March – 4th April 2013.

NHS PLC

Broken Circle

Worrying symptoms of Enron-it is have broken out at groovy health company Circle Health which, in partnership with its staff, runs NHS facilities and a group of private hospitals.

Circle’s parent company, Circle Holdings plc, is owned largely by hedge funds, including Crispin Odey’s Odey Asset Management and Sir Paul Ruddock’s Lansdowne Partners, plu8s the offshore trusts of founder and ex-Goldman Sachs banker Ali Parsa. As 51 percent controller of the Circle Health group that now runs Hinchingbrooke NHS hospital trust in Cambridgeshire, as well as the Nottingham NHS treatment centre, it might be hoped that the company’s financial position is above board and fully understood.

Alas, corporate transparency is in even shorter supply than profits at the struggling firm, especially when it comes to financing what it describes as its “flagship” private hospital in Bath (which earns two-thirds of its income from the NHS). The hospital is owned not be Circle Health but by a Jersey company called Health Properties (Bath) Ltd, which leases the building back to Circle in the UK. Given its offshore status, the finances of this company are secret; but clues in Circle Holdings’ accounts suggest it has debts of around £40m (on some of which it has already defaulted), funding a hospital worth about £35m.

As the Bath hospital is very much part of Circle’s business, these amounts would ordinarily be “consolidated” in Circle Holdings’ balance sheet – increasing its overall debt figure. But this is where the “off balance sheet” trick comes in. Health Properties (Bath) Ltd is owned not just by the Circle group, which has 1,200 B shares in the company, but by two other companies as well; one called Health Estates Ltd, with 1,800 B shares, plus the European arm of Lehman Brothers (in, ahem, administration) with 100 A shares. This structure, says Circle, means it owns just 38.7 percent of the property company and can keep it off its books.

Closer scrutiny, however, shows that Health Estates Ltd (also a Jersey company) is managed by yet another company, Health Estates Managers Ltd (ditto), that is wholly owned by Circle. And when it comes to voiting on matters concerning Health Properties (Bath) Ltd, it has agreed to do whatever Circle tells it to. Since the A and B shareholders appoint equal numbers of the property company’s directors, this means control is nominally shared by Lehmans (in administration) and Circle. But in practice the Lehman administrators, Pricewaterhouse Coopoers, are unlikely to demur from Circle’s wishes, not least given their clear conflict of interest as Circle Holdings’ auditor with duties such as signing off the strange arrangement every year.

An accountancy rule known as SIC-12 says that if a company in substance controls what is known as a “special purpose entity”, such as Health Properties (Bath) Ltd, its results and its assets and liabilities should be consolidated in the holding company’s figures. Other indications that this ought to happen include where the special entity’s assets – such as a big hospital – is used for the wider group’s benefit, as it is here.

Circle Holdings’ latest figures show debts of around £55m. Adding in the Bath debt would take that towards the £100m, which would not look good as the loss-making company – from which Parsa recently departed – repeatedly goes cap in hand to the City to stay afloat while running vital health services. Nor would it be too reassuring for the taxpayer given its reliance on the firm.

MPs on the public accounts committee have already expressed concern over the Hinchingrooke deal, pointing out that “the NHS can never transfer the operational risk of running a hospital, leaving the taxpayer exposed should the franchise fail”. Handing hospitals to companies with offshore, off balance sheet property schemes might not have been the healthiest option.

This is of particular interest to people in the Bristol/ Bath area, as Circle Health’s hospital in Bath was opened last year with some fanfare. It was featured on the local news, if I remember correctly, and adverts for it have appeared in Bristol and, doubtless, some other areas. Yet the company is clearly saddled with massive debt, which it has attempted to hide through a complex off-shore corporate structure intended to keep it off the balance sheet. And it’s partly owned by Lehman Brothers, who were partly responsible for the financial crash in 2010. Given this history and background, it’s questionable that such a company should ever have been given control of NHS hospitals, regardless of the wider issues of the supposed superiority of private enterprise.