Olympic tax breaks

[king_pellinor]

Various sources are reporting that people like Coca-Cola and Macdonalds are responding to pressure and are waiving their right to tax breaks for the Olympics.  So all the masses of profits they'll be making will now be generating tax for the UK Exchequer - what a victory for moral pressure on big business!  Hurrah for grass-roots activism!!

Only... they never qualified for the tax breaks in the first place.  The point of the exemptions was that if you come to the UK only to compete in the Olympics, or as a journalist to cover them (or if you're a company sending people to do such things), then you won't have to pay UK tax on your income - it removes a barrier to people coming.  And as the UK wouldn't have collected the tax if it weren't for the Olympics, as you wouldn't have come, the UK isn't losing out.

As Coca-Cola etc operate in the UK through UK companies, these breaks for non-residents never applied: they're "waiving" a right they never had in the first place.  So, er, why all the fuss?

And why are campaigners crowing about it?  Could it be that they are in fact tilting at windmills? I do wish people would try to understand things that they campaign about.

I think I'll go and publicise the results of my campaign to stop people hunting tigers in Wiltshire.  Might there be an OBE in it for me, if I can show that no tigers have been illegally poached there in the last 10 years?

Comments

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

I tried to read that as, "foie gras activism." No, I don't know why either.

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

Ever since you stopped being a flower of chivalry and became a barely coherent barbarian, you've shown a worrying tendency to do earnest and serious posts about tax. You could at least do them in character. After all, you make me endure whole evenings of Palug speak. :-)

Is it possible to legally poach things, apart from eggs and pears and the like?

Sorry. This comment is entirely missing the point of Outraged Post being Outraged. Also, should be writing. Yes, I know.

[pwibethran.livejournal.com]

There are tigers in Wiltshire... at Longleat.

This does open an opportunity for mass migration of heartless hunters from eastern Europe of said (fierce) pussy cats, so campaigning against it wouldn't be *quite* as pointless...

[kargicq.livejournal.com]

Is that really right? So 38 Degrees just misunderstood totally, and instead of Coke and Adidas explaining, "Actually we aren't entitled to any tax breaks", they decided it was easier simply to say "Er, OK, if it makes you happier we won't take the tax breaks then"??? You're saying it's equivalent to me publicly renouncing my right to a £1000 cash payment for every British gold medal, or something. So why is no one in the MSM explaining this; are they all just even more of a hopeless bunch of uninformed incompetents than I thought??? -N (boggling).

[king-pellinor.livejournal.com]

Well, that's my reading of it. I may be missing something, but I did have a good dig around in the legislation. I think people are just assuming that they're just single entities, rather than groups, so when it says "non-resident companies", that means "US-owned companies like Coca-Cola and McDonalds".

Coca-Cola (I think it was) did say something along the lines of "we never intended to take advantage". I suspect that they could try to take advantage, but they'd have to do such convoluted commercial structures it just wouldn't be worth it - not using any of their existing UK organisation, for example.

What is MSM, by the way?

[chess]

I know I'm late to the party (was linked here by a linkspam about people talking sense about tax) but MSM in this context is 'mainstream media'.