Taxman to probe 43 footie stars and 12 Premier League clubs as HMRC starts tax loophole crackdown
8 agents are also under investigation for tax dodging
MORE than 40 footballers and 12 top flight clubs are being investigated over dodging tax, it emerged last night.
HMRC bosses revealed that eight agents are also being probed as they urged Ministers to change the law to help them stop players sending millions of pounds offshore.
Enforcement chief Jennie Granger said the HMRC was poring over accounts to make sure taxpayers were not being cheated by the stars of the game via a loophole on image rights.
She told MPs that the Taxman’s compliance team had brought in £158 million from football alone over the past two years by cracking down on potential abuse.
The revelation came just days after allegations that Man United manager Jose Mourinho’s advisers had helped him move millions offshore to avoid tax on his image rights earnings – a claim his aides strongly deny.
Ms Granger told MPs on the Public Affairs Committee: “We have 43 players, eight agents, and 12 football clubs under inquiry around the issue of image rights.”
Under current rules, footballers can split image rights from their basic pay to have two separate income streams. HMRC said that in many cases this has seen players set up companies in tax havens overseas to receive rights money.
The HMRC’s new chief executive Jon Thompson said that as a football fan he wanted to see the rules changed – and urged the Government to act.
The Norwich City supporter said: “As a football fan I think it’s very odd to think that you can essentially ply your trade here and that somehow this is the situation.
“If it was for me, I would want to review this, but I need reiterate, that is the current law.”
He added that in some cases “enormous” sums were going to players in image rights when the public would struggle to recognise who they were.
Tory MP Charlie Elphicke told the Sun: “It’s incredible how millions in tax is being avoided by the use of image rights.
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“The chief of HMRC, a football fan, clearly thinks this stinks too but is powerless to act.
“The law on image rights needs to change.”
The HMRC bosses separately insisted they were doing all they could to chase down super-rich Brits evading the tax authorities.
And they conceded there was a risk of losing as much as £14 billion a year from dodgy tax schemes being marketed at Brits.
The National Audit Office (NAO) in November said Britain’s wealthiest people owed the Taxman as much as £1.9 billion.
They revealed there had been just one successful prosecution of a ‘high net worth’ individual in the past five years and that the super-rich pay £1 billion less in tax than five years ago.