Bamford brother behind JCB empire might face £500m invoice to settle tax inquiry

Anthony and brother Mark Bamford, the 2 brothers behind the JCB digger empire may very well be hit with a invoice for greater than £500m to settle a longrunning investigation by HM Income and Customs.

The investigation into Anthony Bamford and brother Mark is known to span a posh community of offshore tax havens and firms.

The inquiry is known to be focusing on efforts by the Bamford dynasty to aggressively minimise the cost of UK taxes and covers twenty years.

The investigation, ongoing for the previous three years, is known to be critical, and of a sort solely launched when the HMRC has grounds to suspect a major lack of tax.

It entails questions over the tax due on shares, held offshore in Bermudan household trusts that management the huge JCB empire. Crucially, it centres on when the brothers took possession of these shares from their father, Joseph Bamford, who died in 2001.

The Bamford brothers inherited the JCB empire from their father and have grown it into one of many world’s largest makers of heavy building gear, with 11,000 employees, pretax income of £558m final yr and factories from Staffordshire to New Delhi in India.

Attorneys appearing for Lord Bamford and Mark Bamford declined to touch upon the document.

An HMRC spokesperson mentioned: “We neither verify nor deny investigations and can’t touch upon identifiable taxpayers or companies resulting from strict confidentiality legal guidelines.”

It’s not the primary HMRC inquiry into Lord Bamford’s funds, that are intently intertwined with JCB.

Bamford informed the Night Customary in 2012 that he had “no tax schemes” and that his tax return was a “easy one”.

The huge bulk of the Bamfords’ wealth and earnings is derived from their shares in JCB and the dividends paid on them.

These shares are held offshore in Bermuda in household trusts on the prime of a sprawling offshore community,

The years-long HMRC inquiry is analyzing who was the proprietor of the shares on the exact time the Bermudan trusts had been created to deal with them in 1996, in line with sources. This implies officers have been contemplating the tax due over the previous 20 years.

If the brothers had owned the shares earlier than 1996, they won’t have paid the proper tax on dividends that flowed from these shares, leaving them with a possible invoice of greater than £500m.

That will be composed of the unique tax owed, curiosity on that tax and a penalty of as much as 200% HMRC steerage suggests.