Grombles

I've written several times about how risky angel investing in start-ups and early stage businesses can be. Having personally invested in about 20 such businesses over the past 10 years, I have probably had to write off at least half of them within the first couple of years - but that doesn't mean they have disappeared completely. Just that my shares are no longer worth anything. That annoys me not just because they cost me money, but because the assets I helped to create may now be earning money for someone else. It may even be illegal and I am letting them get away with it. Let me explain. When you buy shares in a company, depending on the class of shares you buy, you are probably entitled to a share of the profits it makes when the board issues what's known as a dividend. Otherwise the profit is retained in the business to be reinvested in growth. In due course, someone may offer to buy your shares for more money than you originally paid. So there are basically two ways o...

So thousands of British people have bank accounts in Switzerland - including a few wealthy Labour donors it would seem. Now Miliband is implying that these people are "dodgy" tax avoiders or worse. There was a time when people who held money and other valuables in overseas bank accounts and vaults probably did it so HMRC and other law enforcement authorities would have difficulty finding out what was there, who controlled it, and how it got there. One might assume that if this was their only reason, then they probably did have something to hide. Fair enough to call them 'dodgy'. Of course 'dodgy' people still use overseas bank accounts to hide their money and to evade or avoid tax. But Switzerland is no longer a sensible place to conceal your wealth and identity. Criminals and tax avoiders today would probably choose other jurisdictions. So why do thousands of law-abiding, honest and probably largely charitable people still have Swiss bank accounts? Well...

It keeps rearing its head. Tax the rich! Make them pay their 'fair share'. It's the rich that got us into this mess. And all those other 'make them pay' soundbites designed to grab votes from our ever more squeezed population. The net effect is that wealthy people are pouring money into the Conservative party to help them fight off the scary wealth taxing parties. But all wealthy people aren't the same. What's important is not what they have, but what they spend their money on. And what the UK badly needs is for the people who know how to create jobs and wealth, to do more of it. I've written previously about why mansion or wealth taxes are both impractical and counter-productive in terms of helping the economy to recover. They are also unlikely to reap vast rewards for the treasury, but popular soundbites put left-wing parties into power. It's not about whether it actually makes money for the country, it's about whether it's popular and s...

No wonder we're all in the shit. How I hate bloody form filling, especially when there's clearly no point in the activity whatsoever. Wastes my time, wastes paper (assuming it's not yet interneted), and even more off-pissingly, keeps some civil service twat in a job, paid me, that could be done by a waste paper bin or NEEDN'T BE DONE AT ALL. This morning I received a letter from the Specialist Personal Tax Employee Shares & Securities Unit. My company takes advantage of an HMRC employee share option scheme that basically encourages business owners to share any gains in the value of their companies with their management. Excellent idea which has enabled me to share in the good fortunes of previous companies with several of the people who helped me build them. What works for them, works for me. So far, so good. I originally filled out the necessary forms to advise HMRC about the scheme I had set up for a company I own. I told them who was registered on the scheme,...

My previous post about why a mansion tax would not only be wrong but impractical, seems to have persuaded most of the government together with all sensibly-minded folk, but not, apparently, the unconvinced Vince. From the Guardian today: Cable did not rule out new, higher council tax bands on multimillion-pound properties. "There are vast numbers of extraordinarily valuable properties now around the south of England netting very large gains for their owners – many of whom come from abroad, incidentally – and it's not taxed at all," he said. "Basically, you get people with multimillion-pound properties paying exactly the same council tax as somebody in a three-bedroom semi. So the system doesn't work." What does he mean " netting very large gains for their owners"? Is he under a delusion that by sitting in an expensive property people are somehow making money from it? Quite apart from the obvious point that a bigger property costs more to run (m...

A 'mansion tax' would be unfair, impractical to implement, and would bite hands that feed us. What's the difference between a hoodie who raids a shop to take a TV because he doesn't have enough money to buy one for himself, and a politician who advocates taking someone else's money because it doesn't affect him or most people who vote for him? This might sound a ridiculous comparison, one party being irresponsible, and the other believing they're taking responsibility for the well-being of society, but I'm suggesting in reality there are some unhealthy similarities between their attitudes. "It doesn't matter if I'm not the one losing out - it will only affect a small number of people who can probably afford it". The hoodie grabs TVs they can't pay for, the latter is planning to grab money from people who own larger houses than them. Both do it because it's easy and their peers encourage them to do it. It makes them popular a...