Barclays prevents Guardian publishing their Tax Scheme Documents

Barclays continue with Gagging order despite the fact the documents are freely available on the net. The gagging order prevents them from publishing them or publishing information where they can be found.

The FT Blog has a most amusing piece and has offered Barclays free legal advice and explained to Freshfields (Barclays solicitors) where they have gone
wrong.

The Guardian is of course furious that they are being prevented from both publishing the information or from advising their readers where they can read them.  The documents are all over the net and easily available for anyone to find

FT Alaphaville. "More importantly, the decision to pursue a legal remedy has drawn the bank into an ongoing PR battle that will end only with the curtailment of SCM’s tax avoidance activities, or the removal of all executive members of the board, or both, in our view".

The Whistle blower has delivered more revelations about Barclays SCM dept which have been published.

On reading the documents one can not help but come to the same conclusion as everyone else that these arrangements involving Trusts, Subsidiary, offshore
branches in Luxembourg, isle of Man, Cayman Islands, Ltd partnerships, and a series of financial instruments are simply designed to avoid Barclays paying UK Tax.  Which of course is exactly the claim being made by the whistle blower.

They do not appear to be the type of transactions that might be used to reduce their tax by a banking client, say a  legitimate manufacturer and exporter of Chrome plated widgets purchasing raw materials oversaes in one currency, selling the widgets in another with a mixture of tax regimes and domiciles to deal with.

RBS had a similar dept which it is now winding down and an RBS spokesman is quotes as: "The idea that we could take support from the Treasury with one hand and somehow pick their pocket with the other would be wrong on every level."

It would appear that these concerns has not stopped Barclays as they are at the moment negotiating with the Treasury for the taxpayer to take on the liability of their bad toxic assets.

As you can expect Guardian letter writers are having a field day and there is certainly some evidence to show that what ever else Barclay's management of this whole affair is a PR disaster.

The Guardian Editorial on the injunction is to be found here.

This will run for a while yet