‘Sajid Javid has come under increasing pressure to explain how he benefited from a scheme used by Deutsche Bank to reduce the tax liability on staff bonus payments. He was a senior executive at Deutsche Bank in 2004 but his advisers have repeatedly refused to explain what benefit he derived from the scheme, also used by UBS, to encourage employee share ownership. The Standard’s Jim Armitage says Mr Javid should not be blamed for having been one of the employees whose bonus was put through the tax avoiding structure. “Blame the employers for abusing the rules, and the Government for a byzantine tax code that makes avoidance so easy,” he writes.
Sources: Daily Mail, Evening Standard’
Strictly speaking, the answer to the question to what extent Mr Javid benefited from the scheme is “not at all”: the Supreme Court has just decided that the scheme didn’t work, as we explain in our Briefing. But that pedantry aside, it’s difficult to disagree with Mr Armitage: it was hardly Mr Javid’s fault that his employer sought to indulge in antics of this kind. Now he’s in government it’s part of his job (or at least that of his colleagues) to discourage such behaviour: and it seems to us that all things being considered they are doing that pretty effectively so far.
