a blow to the UK tax take, which means everyone else will have to make it up - this from Anthony Hiilton in the Evening Standard:
Every day someone in the City pops up to say how much tax revenue the country will lose because City “talent” will move overseas to escape the Government's 50 per cent tax rate and the bonus levy. Boris Johnson has taken to saying it twice a day. Banks, brokers, hedge funds are, it seems, poised to join the rush to … well not America any more after Obama's tax raid, but somewhere. The mantra is that wherever it turns out to be, our tax revenues will plunge when they go.
But none of these self-appointed guardians of the nation's finances points out that selling Cadbury to Kraft, the US food group, will also have a hugely negative effect on UK tax revenues — far more than the loss of a few hedge funds. The record shows that UK firms which pass into foreign ownership — businesses such as Rowntree, Asda, Pilkington, BAA — very soon pay much lower corporation tax to the UK Government. This is because their new foreign parent organises affairs so that what was a UK profit is subsequently generated in a country or a tax haven where the rates are lower.
This is only the first tranche of tax loss. The parent will also move manufacturing abroad, denying the Exchequer another stream of tax, and then there is the lost income tax when the business's “top talent” has to relocate.
It is an odd world where the possible loss of a few hedge funds arouses more concern than the loss of Cadbury.
http://www.thisislond...s-vital-as-cadbury.do