The taxman has released a list of the ‘twenty worst tax fugitives’.
Seven of them are tobacco smugglers/counterfeiters, so there’s obviously been no increase in dodgy tobacco as a result of punitive taxation and widespread bans.
The thing is, the money involved in total, for all twenty, barely makes it into twenty million. Even if they recovered every penny, that would pay for about a day’s membership of the EU.
If these are the twenty worst offenders then we don’t have a tax evasion problem at all, at least, not one worth bothering about. The taxman would recover more if he set his sights on the dodgy dealings of Government.
But then, they are Government.
(Short ones for a few days. I have a job interview next week and have to fill out amazing amounts of paper before they even speak to me).
It’s certainly a very small amount compared to all the huge multi-corps which pay very, very little tax indeed since they do a “deal” with the taxman.
Bet the smugglers are looking forward to plain packs, these guys are the tip of the iceberg.
I’m actually wondering if when manufacturing fake ciggies, one could go the whole hog and simply make ciggies which contain no tobacco whatsoever, flavouring the cardboard (or whatever) with e-cig liquid and nicotine and if necessary dyeing the ends to resemble tobacco. HMRC would then have no legal reason to pursue the manufacturer, especially as there would be no logo to infringe, no tobacco to illegally import, and no tax to actually pay.
Admittedly you’d likely have trouble selling the same fags twice to the punters, but a substantial discount ought to sort out customer resistence somewhat, don’t you think?
Why cardboard? You could take some innocuous leaf, dry and shred it, soak it in tobacco flavour and nicotine juice, and make a fake that is 100% nontaxable (no real tobacco) and hard to tell from a cheap smoke. It can be done and I’ll bet it already has been.