Asif Aziz: The billionaire and the tax evading gift shops | Hacker News Reader

Asif Aziz: The billionaire and the tax evading gift shops

londoncentric.media

32 pointsspeckx9 comments

It's been a running gag for UKers to complain about mysteriously bad businesses such as car washes and candy stores for the last ten years -- usually these places don't seem to make any sense at all, here's at least part of a rational explanation.

shops like these are obvious fronts for money laundering. Anyone who walks down Oxford street and sees all the sweet shops will know what i'm talking about. Another example is how, apparently the number of barbers in the uk has doubled in the last 10 years. The authorities are being staggeringly incompetent in dealing with it. Maybe they can't, or maybe they don't want to because these shops are keeping the high street from dying (just to be clear that's not a good excuse).

This fits in to a wider pattern of authorities in the uk taking no meaningful action against the people who bring over illegal migrants over the channel, and against grey market companies who block book all the driving tests in the entire country and probably in many other areas.

At least i haven't heard about major benefits fraud. Maybe thanks to Universal Credit, or perhaps i just haven't heard about it.

My "citation needed" theory is that 14 years of austerity and incompetent Tories (heh Cameron sounds more intelligent than Boris, but he's also a Grade-A moron) have destroyed the government's capabilities to control things. Police budgets were also slashed, and now criminals snatch your phones off your hands.

Let's see if the same rot shows up in the USA soon...

Did you actually read the article ?

It's about the rich and powerful local using foreign students to create fake companies that supposedly rip off the British government...

The rot you speak of is the rich not paying their fair share and hence a society slowly dying... Then the rich hire their own private security guards to protect themselves and let the dying society fall into Robbers and robbed...

Fight the cause not the effect...

And the rich and powerful are the same that put their friends into power and those friends let them fuck all over the rest of society...

"shops like these are obvious fronts for money laundering. "

According to the article, they don't need to. They make gobs of money and don't pay any taxes to anybody.

I don't know much about how the UK functions but it seems very strange that a company simply sells its ownership of the shop to another company including all the inventory after failing to pay taxes. This is limited liability^2 in that the owners as well as the companies are not liable for the taxes owed! Is there something I am missing here?

From TFA:

"There is no legal responsibility for a landlord to enforce the payment of taxes by their tenants, nor any suggestion that Aziz should be paying the bill."

This usually makes some sense. But in this case it is obviously being abused. I guess that a police investigation would need to track the flow of money back to the landlord. Or put in place better legislation. Banks for example cannot claim ignorance about their clients and are required to deny access to their services if something does not look good.

Fun fact, you can put whatever rubbish you want as your personal details when registering a company in the UK as long as you can provide supporting documentation, which can be fake also. The government not only does not check, but also openly states that it does not verify the data entered in Companies House.

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