Wayne Rooney’s Dodgy Accountants
There seems to be a rash of it, i.e. Accountants going to jail and now Wayne Rooney’s accountant is in trouble.
I thought they were supposed to be smart!
Firstly, we had Darren Upton, who had 800 mainly IT Contractors on his books going to jail for 6 years.
Now we have David Perrin (remember Reggie?) going to jail for 18 months for a dodgy scheme which involved writing money off as a gift to charity.
Wayne Rooney, Guy Ritchie, Michal Parkinson, Martin Corry and Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) and Jeremy Paxman were clients.
Vantis
I remember going to meet Vantis one time as they wanted to increase their number of IT Contractors and saw ITContractor.com as a vehicle.
Nothing came of it but they did send us info every so often and wrote a couple of expert articles but we haven‘t been in touch in years.
I hot on pretty well with them – but that was long before this.
I got on well with, and like, Darren Upton too.
The Scheme
The scheme involved giving share to charities and then writing the gift off against tax at much more than the amount they were worth.
Perrin spent his share of the profits on fancy foreign holidays, sports cars, works of art and expensive houses.
He set up four companies in the Channel Islands, allowed clients to buy the shares for a few pennies and then manipulated the price by paying people to buy and sell them and then his clients gave the shares to charity and wrote off the increased ‘˜value‘ of the shares against tax.
Duds
Of course, the shares the charities were getting were duds.
The charities found that they couldn‘t sell them to anyone at the listed price.
That‘s pretty low.
Surely some of his clients must have had reservations about it.
Vantis collapsed 2 years ago owing the taxman £10m.
The Words
Here‘s the words of the song that Perrin wrote and sang at the office party.
That‘s what you call tempting fate.
Harry Redknapp portrayed himself as being pretty stupid at his trial but he wasn‘t this dumb.
Perhaps David Perrin could release it as a single (Please Release Me on the B side) to help pay back some of the money.
Taunting the taxman: The cover version
I Will Survive: Gloria Gaynor – arrangement by David Perrin At first I was afraid, I was petrified.
Kept thinking Clerkenwell and Modia [two companies caught up in the scam] were suicide.
But then I spent so many nights thinking how much cash we made
And we got paid
Almost as good as getting laid…
They should have changed that stupid law,
They should have buggered charity
But they have left that lovely tax relief
For folks to pay to me…
Weren’t you the ones who said that you’d shaft us with a GAAR? [General Anti-Avoidance Rule, a measure aimed at closing tax loopholes]
You may think you’ve got cojones
We’ve got bigger balls by far.
Surely Wayne Rooney would have been too clever to fall for this scheme.
