Does the UK promote tax avoidance?

William Somerset Maugham wrote of Monaco ‘a sunny place for shady people’. Now I would venture that the UK is a shady place for monied people. Why?

Tax avoidance continues to attract widespread attention particularly in the UK. In the 1930s the Duke of Westminster case was significant in this regard. The 1933 case concerned Hugh Grosvenor the then Duke avoiding paying income tax by remunerating his gardener by way of covenant. In CIR v Duke of Westminster [1936] AC 1 the judge said: ‘Every man is entitled if he can to order his affairs so as that the tax attaching under the appropriate acts is less than it otherwise would be.’

The Dukes of Westminster have continued this historical association with legally acceptable tax avoidance in various different guises (eg Barty-King and another v Ministry of Defence [1979] 2 All ER 80)....