Richard Tice in tax troubles again

Last month, Rats in a Sack reported on how Reform deputy leader Richard Tice appeared to be threatening the Sunday Times with legal action over what he deemed a “libellous” story about his tax affairs.

In March, the newspaper ran a story on its front page headlined “Tice ‘avoided £600,000 in tax”, outlining how Dubai Dicky managed to avoid paying the sum after obtaining a rare and obscure legal status for his company, which owns a number of industrial estates.

Tice responded to the article – which detailed how he had avoided hundreds of thousands of pounds in corporation tax by listing the company entirely legally on the Guernsey stock exchange and applying for it to become a real estate investment trust, a corporate structure whose complex rules are administered by HMRC – by posting on X: “The libellous headline is the work of a desperate Establishment trying to smear me and Reform.”

Suggested Reading

What will Viktor Orbán’s landslide defeat mean for poor Matt Goodwin?

Rats in a Sack

A month on, Tice is understood to have yet to trigger legal action against the paper, quite possibly because it was at pains to say that the Reform man was not accused of doing anything against the law.

This weekend it published a follow-up story, again by Whitehall editor Gabriel Pogrund, claiming that Tice’s company did break the law by failing to pay tens of thousands of pounds in tax on dividends which were paid to him and his offshore trust. It said that Tice, the party’s business, trade and energy spokesman, received at least £91,000 in excess as a result of the failure.

The party has claimed the row is “a minor administrative error”, with Zia Yusuf, its home affairs spokesperson, telling Sky News it was a “non-story” and Tice himself calling the failure a “technicality” and saying “overall HMRC received the correct amount of tax due”.

But with reports reminding voters Tice last year demanded Angela Rayner resign over the non-payment of £40,000 in stamp duty, dubbing her “the biggest hypocrite in the land”, and his star in Reform already waning – he is still smarting at losing out on the Treasury spokesperson role to Tory turncoat Robert Jenrick – might he soon be spending even more time in the UAE with fiancée Isabel Oakeshott?