The Panorama customer said: "It is the weirdest arrangement, isn't it?" To which the banker replied: "I know, just to get round the EU tax basically." "It's only a paper transaction, oh very much so … But because we pay the dividend from outside the EU, it falls outside the scope. The man from Lloyds told the Panorama customer about the High Income Fund: "The income made from the fund would go to Hong Kong and then Hong Kong would send it out to all the clients, and that's how we get round it The Lloyds banker on Jersey, by contrast, said it was up to the customer whether he wanted to inform the taxman and that it was not the bank's business. The Northern Rock banker said they would not tell the taxman but said that the customer should. But a banker from Northern Rock Guernsey told Panorama's undercover customer that he could avoid the EU tax by opening an account in the name of a non-trading company. These savings should be covered by the European Savings Tax Directive, which was introduced to prevent tax avoidance and evasion. Northern Rock – bailed out by the taxpayer with £27bn of taxpayers' money – has an offshore subsidiary in Guernsey that has seen deposits almost double to £2bn since the bank was nationalised. Other publicly funded banks are also thriving in the Channel Island tax havens. At the last G20 meeting, Gordon Brown announced: "There will be an end to tax havens." But not, it seems, for banks funded by UK taxpayers offering tax avoidance schemes. The affair is not just embarrassing for Lloyds and its chief executive, Eric Daniels, who is under pressure after the bank's disastrous takeover of HBOS. Were we to find that happening, we would take a very dim view of it." We might interpret that as meaning he was so reckless that he was giving his client a signal that he didn't have to make a return of income. It is not our business."ĭave Hartnett, permanent secretary at HMRC, said: "That's an incredibly irresponsible thing for him to have said. The "customer" made it clear that he did not want to pay tax but when he asked about reporting to Revenue & Customs (HMRC), the banker said: "It's of no interest to us whether you tell the taxman or not.
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