Private equity tycoon Guy Hands, head of the troubled entertainment group EMI, must have reckoned he was finally on to a sure-fire winner. For every dollar he invested in a film called Crust – about a two-metre-long shrimp – he expected to recover $1.40 in tax relief. He apparently anticipated a similar return from Nine Dead Gay Guys and other guaranteed box-office flops, in the tradition immortalized by the film The Producers. But the tax office refused to pay up. So Hands and 74 others sued the accountancy firm and the lawyer who had advised them – which is the only reason the rest of us ever got to hear about it.1
The fiddle typifies well enough the increasingly disreputable nature of a tax ‘consensus’ that has emerged during the past decade or so. It has been applied worldwide, regardless of local circumstance. But what may look at first sight like a harmless spectator sport, rewarding its star players more generously than baseball or soccer, is in fact killing children.
