Payback for good: Take That and the other penitent tax avoiders

It’s tough being really rich and famous when – out of nowhere – you get publicly shamed for avoiding tax. What do you do? Continue to reap the benefits of the totally legal financial arrangements you entered into in good faith? Or sack your accountant (creative differences, perhaps) and pay it back?

Let’s pause for a moment to honour those who, whether for strictly ethical or reputational reasons, take that second route. Take That, for example, members of which have recently repaid more than £20m to HMRC after investing in a scheme that allowed them to offset losses involved in a “music investment” plan against other taxable income. http://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/take-pay-back-more-20million-8175524

In 2014, a judge ruled that the tax shelter Icebreaker, which Gary Barlow, Howard Donald, Mark Owen and their manager, Jonathan Wild, exploited (but not Robbie Williams or Jason Orange), was an avoidance scheme. “With a new team of accountants, we are working to settle things with all parties involved ASAP,” Barlow said months later in a Twitter-based sorry stream. (Take That have declined to comment since the reported repayment.)

Gabby Logan, the former gymnast and BBC Sport presenter, pulled out of the same scheme in 2012 and promised, in 2014, to pay back any money owed (we don’t know how much). “I have never hidden anything,” she said in a statement when it was all exposed.

Katie Melua held her hands up so enthusiastically after being named as one of the 1,000-plus investors in the scheme that she went so far as to praise the journalists who blew it open, adding: “If there is ambiguity in the law, then laws should be changed to disallow schemes like this, so that they would never be presented by legitimate tax experts to less experienced people like myself in the first place.” She had invested £850,000 in the scheme, but said that she owes no more money.

for his “terrible error of judgment”. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/reformed-tax-avoider-jimmy-carr-paid-5081804

Corporate tax-avoiders tend to appear less chastened on the rare occasions that they do pop a little back into the public purse. Starbucks suggested it had been surprised by the customer reaction to its tax arrangements when it emerged in 2012 that the US coffee giant had paid marginal tax thanks to a complex structure. The firm struck a deal to pay back more than £20m and last year paid corporation tax of £8.1m, which was more than it owed – but only a touch less than the £8.6m it paid over the 14 years before its change of heart.

Of course, there are successful people who manage not to fall innocently and naively into such schemes. So a final shoutout to the tax angels who are proud to pay their dues from the off. They include JK Rowling, who in 2012 said: “It would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism.”