Nadhim Zahawi says tax error was ‘careless and not deliberate’

46 comments
  1. Can anyone use this argument in court? “I may have run over the small child, but I did it carelessly, not deliberately.”

  2. I guess he will be sacking the team of highly paid accountants he hired to hide all that money from HMRC. Very careless a better accounting firm next time

  3. >not deliberate

    How can you ‘accidentally’ buy your family home via a company in Gibraltar or have money owed to you from the company you founded ‘accidently’ paid into a trust in the Caribbean?

  4. And certainly accidentally instructed his lawyers to threaten an assortment of journalists over a number of years who have been looking into his accidental tax error. And then accidentally chose not to correct his error during all this time, until finally it came into the public eye.

  5. Funny how all these tory politicians keep making “careless” errors.

    You might almost think they didn’t think the laws they made for other “little” people applied to the likes of them.

  6. The guy who was posting about his rule breaking got multiple ‘strongly worded letter’ warnings from Zahawi’s lawyers telling him to stop posting or be sued. Doesn’t exactly seem ‘careless’ to me

  7. And was it also careless of Zahawi to deny, threaten and continually change his explanation to cover this up since it was raised last year?

  8. So if it was just a “careless” mistake, why did he have to come to an “arrangement” with the HMRC over how much he would pay, rather than just paying what was owed, as someone who had made an honest mistake would?

  9. Someone on Reddit recently summed up the Government perfectly on here;

    *”They are a zombie majority.”*

    Nothing about them ressembles what they stood for in 2019. Brexit wasn’t completed. Still, there are problems with migrants drowning at Sea. The Red Wall voters have been totally taken for mugs. No reform on de-criminalizing non-subscription of the television licence. What a dinosaur law in 2023.

    At 29 years of existing in this world, I hope (wishful thinking) that we will never in my lifetime see the amount of lies, deception, and suffering inflicted on the lives of normal British human beings by British Politicians ever again.

    Ride the rough out, one more Year. The more scandal, the more sleaze that comes in within this current Year to next, will be further and further self destruction of the Conservative Party. It’s long gone from salvageable now, and I would argue that The Labour Party would be better off splitting in half, given Sir Kier and his rich chums can’t be fucking bothered to join Mick Lynch and the working class.

  10. The utter hilarity that the government is claiming that he is transparent. He got the maximum penalty if it was actually careless so he got no reductions for telling HMRC, no reductions for helping HMRC and no reductions for giving HMRC any information whatsoever. The fact the maximum penalty was given demonstrates anything but transparency.

    In addition, the giving of a careless penalty only means that HMRC had no proof that he didn’t knowingly do it. The tribunals hold a deliberate penalty to a very high bar of proof which means frequently they aren’t given out when they really should.

  11. Woooops silly me, would you look at that? I accidentally moved 3.7 million pounds into an offshore account. I’ll definitely make sure I look into that BEFORE I get caught…

  12. Gone from ‘there was no issue’ to ‘okay there was an issue but it was an honest mistake’. What’s next, ‘fine I got caught out but it’s not that big a deal’? Straight outta BJ’s playbook

  13. It’s funny how a lot of the top 1% of rich people are incredibly greedy assholes who refuse to spend a penny on anything that benefits the common person but when it comes to making sure that they avoided paying taxes, they always claim it’s a “mistake”.

    It’s funny how they never “accidentally” lose money. They always “accidentally” gain or keep it. The sooner the average person in this country realizes they’re actually hated by the rich, the better.

  14. I’d like to see how much trouble I’d be in if I was careless about my taxes but I’m not willing to try it out because I guarantee I’d be bent over fairly quickly.

  15. Careless? What a load of balderdash?

    Do you think he actually manages his own tax affairs He would have signed off on this.

  16. If you’ve ever been Chancellor of the Exchequer, I don’t think you should be able to get away with claiming a “careless mistake” on your taxes.

  17. If it were a Labour politician caught up in such a scandal, he would call for their head. Why is it OK for him to plead ignorance and carelessness then? It was deliberate and he is just sticking to the usual politician line of only apologising for being caught out. I only hope the public are not stupid enough to fall for it again.

  18. He paid himself in a loan with no repayment plan instead of giving himself a salary or dividends, no fucking way anyone could possibly do that by accident

  19. Honestly… my hand just got accidentally stuck in the till whilst I was distracted by my face in the pig trough…. do these crooks really think we’re THAT stupid !!!!

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