Advisers who introduced clients to the Icebreaker scheme knew "perfectly well" its sole aim was to enable tax avoidance, lawyers for an insurance company have claimed, citing a Tribunal ruling.
Icebreaker was a tax avoidance scheme that created tax losses out of nothing for wealthy people - including celebrities from pop music group Take That - which the government said could have cost the taxpayer £120m. Members of the scheme - which was devised by Caroline Hamilton - claimed to be active partners trading in the creative industries, selling, for example, the rights to a song or an idea for a book. They claimed tax relief on greater losses than they invested in the partnerships. The return on the partners' ‘investment' was the tax relief, which was considerably larger than t...
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