The Mossack Fonseca scandal goes from strength to strength. It has now moved from ‘oooooh’ to ‘Jesus fucking Christ!!!’ mode on the international scale of amazement and tabloid incitement to moral high-groundiness.

To encourage these feelings in the public, the media have found some interesting facts, nice, inflammatory ones, to help us with our disgust, in case bent politicians and money-laundering oligarchs should be insufficient.

Mossack Fonseca was started by two men. No prizes for guessing their names. The Fonseca half was an author, quite a famous one in most of Panama. Mossack was no less than a fucking nazi!!!!!! (I borrowed those exclamation marks from The Sun; they have plenty more). Mossack’s father was a high ranking third reicher who fled prosecution to Panama, where Nazi war criminals were always welcome. He had a son, who I’ll call ‘Adolph’ but really I don’t know his name. And it was Adolph that joined Fonseca to create ‘the most evil company the world has ever known!!!’

And now it transpires that London is the most likely place for offshore billionaires to buy their property portfolios. Which we’ve known for years. ‘Big’ houses aren’t owned by individuals, they’re owned by companies. Offshore companies. So when Billy Smiff from Dagenham buys a ‘big house’ from Kenny Entwhistle, from Bromley, he simply buys the offshore company. So the house is just an asset of the company, even if said company owns nothing else. Thus it stays offshore, stays in the company and there’s no tax, no stamp duty, nothing. Cos its out of British jurisdiction. Even though its in Pimlico. Which is, far as I know, still part of Great Britain.

Mossack Fonseca facilitate such deals. A lot of them. Ok, they also facilitated a lot of much much shadier stuff too. Money laundering. Corrupt politicians building up hidden caches of cash in accounts in close relative’s names. Possible bribery issues with FIFA’s main man when he was at UEFA (FIFA corruption??? Again???? Nooooooooo…) And this is all very bad.

A question: how much tax would you LIKE to pay?? How much would you voluntarily gift this or any other fine nation, that it can squander it on parking restrictions, benefits payments for illegal immigrant jihadis (I borrowed that one from The Mail, WAYNE!), and overseas aid to countries better off than we are?

If the answer is anywhere between ‘not a penny’ and ‘less than those bastards make me pay every year’, then you too, were you sufficiently moved, could find ways to ‘avoid’ some taxation. If you were very rich, you’d have teams of people working on nothing but that. And its legal.

Offshore trusts, foreign registered companies, tax havens, all perfectly legal. The tax system, however, is totally fucking useless. They’ll come after me because the lightbulb I claimed as ‘a business expense’ in 1983 was in fact used in my home. (The bulb cost £1.27; the cost of the investigation: £42,578.99). But they can’t touch the ‘big guys’ whose money movement are all carefully controlled and perfectly legal.

And that’s where the indignation comes in. We, as poor individuals, are not in the position to ‘avoid’ tax, whereas the super-rich are. And do.

String the bastards up; that’s what I say. Nothing to do with jealousy. Just ‘morals’, innit?

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx