Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun Attacks Russell Brand.
December 4, 2014 Category: An Occupier's Perspective, Democracy Action Working Group No Comments 
The Sun is today attacking Occupy supporter Russell Brand for the fact his landlord paid no taxes.
I have emailed him the following extract about Murdoch’s genuinely hypocritical tax avoidance from The Prostitute State:
“Almost every single one of these media billionaires are up to their eyeballs in tax-havens or legal tax-avoidance of one form or another. Having the billionaire media within the tax-haven cabal, makes it easier for the tax-havens’ client politicians and lobbyists to protect the UK’s infamous network of tax-stealing havens, from what would otherwise be a far more outraged public.
Let us go through their tax-haven links one by one.
According to a US Government Accountability Office study in 2009, News Corp has the third largest number of tax-haven subsidiaries, among the one hundred largest companies in the US. The Huffington Post reported, in 2011, that News Corp’s total of tax-haven subsidiaries came to 136, including 16 in the Cayman Islands, 26 in the British Virgin Islands and one in Panama which has a zero corporation tax rate. This is where Murdoch had located his Twentieth Century Fox Films. The Huffington Post reported that between 2003 and 2006, according to the data available in News Corp’s SEC filings (Murdoch moved his company from Australia to the US at this time); it paid US federal tax rates below 5%.
In another example of three pillars of The Prostitute State operating in tandem, the Huffington Post reported how Murdoch’s News International lobbied the US government in favour of a free-trade agreement with the Panamanian tax-haven where its subsidiary is based. Thus you have a media corporation lobbying the government for the tax-haven where its subsidiary is based! But the low tax rates legally paid by Murdoch since he moved his corporation to the States are not new for him.
Paul Vallelly reported in The Independent in 2011, that News Corp paid ZERO net UK corporation tax between 1988 and 1999, despite being the country’s largest newspaper corporation. The BBC reported that this was despite pre-tax profits of nearly £1.4bn. So whilst his newspapers thunder about slashing help for refugees and the unemployed or the cost of the EU’s modest bureaucracy, his companies are legally avoiding taxes. In one year alone, the BBC estimated that legal tax avoidance by Murdoch’s companies cost the British taxpayer £92 million. Again the key reason why global media giants can pounce like vultures on individual national newspaper and media companies, paying their fair share of national corporation taxes, is their use of tax-haven subsidiaries.”
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Donnachadh x
