Is Richard Tice about to see Rupert Murdoch’s News UK in court? That appears to be the case from an X post accusing a Sunday Times headline on his tax affairs of being libellous – but he may not have the strongest of cases.
Last weekend, the newspaper ran a story on its front page headlined “Tice ‘avoided £600,000 in tax”, outlining how the deputy Reform leader managed to avoid paying the sum after obtaining a rare and obscure legal status for his company, which owns a number of industrial estates.
The piece – which bore all the hallmarks of having been combed over rigorously by News UK lawyers – detailed how Tice 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 (Reit), a corporate structure whose complex rules are administered by HMRC.
The upshot was that the company paid nothing in corporation tax on its multimillion-pound profits for most of 2018 and 2021. The article, by Whitehall editor Gabriel Pogrund, quoted Dan Neidle, founder of Tax Policy Associates, who said it was possible that Tice had been engaged in “highly aggressive tax planning”.
Tice responded to the article by posting on X: “The libellous headline is the work of a desperate Establishment trying to smear me and Reform.”
If it’s libellous, then presumably Dubai Dicky will be suing the paper for defamation? Possibly: but it’s unlikely he will have much joy. Firstly, tax avoidance – rather than tax evasion – is not illegal, and the paper was at pains to say that the Reform man is not accused of doing anything against the law.
Secondly, it ran the figures showing how little his firm, Quidnet Reit Ltd, had paid in corporation tax in the years concerned, past him. “The Sunday Times showed its working to Tice, who agreed with and independently arrived at the same figure,” it reported.
And thirdly, to prove libel, under section one of the Defamation Act 2013, claimants must show that serious harm to reputation has been caused or is likely, yet Tice has already claimed it actually proves what a splendid government minister he’d be! “Voters should be reassured to have a successful businessman who knows how to make money for shareholders running a business, trade and energy department, making money and growth for taxpayers,” he cheered to the paper.
Perhaps, rather than bothering the courts, Tice should be resigning: after all, that was precisely what he demanded Angela Rayner do over a relatively trifling £40,000 in stamp duty, dubbing her “the biggest hypocrite in the land”.
(On a tangent, the story was yet another Sunday Times scoop for Pogrund. His ostensible boss, political editor Caroline Wheeler, has not had a byline in the paper since February 15, coincidentally around the same time it emerged that her husband Tom Harper had been commissioned by a Labour-linked think tank to delve into the backgrounds of Pogrund and his then colleague Harry Yorke.)
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