No chance of a Riviera rebate for all the little people

What a grubby business it is, this packing of wives off to Riviera resorts to save a few million in tax, writes ORNA MULCAHY

What a grubby business it is, this packing of wives off to Riviera resorts to save a few million in tax, writes ORNA MULCAHY

DOES ANYONE have a number for Angelina Jolie, because I have this great part for her. Imagine, if you can, a film about women who get parked in Italy for a while so that their husbands can avoid paying capital gains tax on the sale of their company; instead of sitting around having manicures and lattes, waiting for the man from KPMG to come calling with all those papers to sign, they cook up a plan to make off with the money themselves, minus husbands! Julia Roberts would be excellent too and could do a lovely Irish lilt.

It would be a top-class thriller with lots of frantic wig-changing scenes in railway station toilets and passing around of Louis Vuitton hold-alls full of money, or cut up newspaper. Inevitably they get chased in cars, motorboats and helicopters by suave killers sent by their grey-faced, Gant-wearing husbands back in Monaghan who will stop at nothing, nothing I tell you, to get the money back.

I’m seeing Brendan Gleeson as Gerry McCaughey. The whole double bluff ends up somewhere in South America, with the women opening an orphanage for abused girls until one day a bounty hunter from Donaghmoyne comes calling . . .

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Well, what do you think? Does it have legs?

Seriously though, what a grubby business it is, this packing of wives off to Riviera resorts to save a few big notes (as a million used to be known in the good old days) in tax. Landing them, out of season, in the kind of resort to which rich men’s wives were banished in Victorian times if they got depressed or took to drink, or couldn’t produce an heir. All to avoid paying out 20 per cent in tax – not a punitive amount – because in their own world, what they are doing is perfectly legal, and why should they pay tax (to that shower that is in Government – they wouldn’t trust them with the money). Only little people pay taxes, and the rich provide jobs for lots of little people.

At least the McCaughey and McBride ladies were allowed to come home after they hung around for long enough to establish residency, signed the relevant papers (don’t bother your pretty little head now about the small print) and gave the Italian government a bob or two in the process.

How do you explain such an extended holiday to friends? Efficient tax planning? Well no, one has to be discreet – so many begrudgers out there. The advice they got from those pillars of the community at KPMG was not to blab about things, or in the accountant’s own oily words, “minimise dissemination of knowledge . . . as Revenue attack is more likely if this route was to be copied by others”. In other words, if other people lucky enough to sell businesses for millions found out about it, they’d all be at it.

Of course the Century Homes lot were not the only ones at it – not at all. I know of wives who’ve been bored out of their minds in Portugal or Gibraltar or Malta, sitting out a tax year or two while their husbands zip in and out of the jurisdiction, under the Revenue radar. The cynic might call it the best possible arrangement for the men.

Stranded in the sun, wearing their enormous sunglasses, these women might tell you, in their reflective moments and in the strictest of confidence, that it’s not easy being married to a wealthy man. Not at all. Nobody, in fact, knows what they have to put up with. Men can be so controlling. Yes, we’ve heard all that before.

The Financial Times last week carried an article about the appalling situation of trophy wives who now find themselves almost destitute, though still in possession of their husbands’ credit cards. What can they do? Buy expensive clothes and handbags on those credit cards and exchange them immediately for cash in posh second-hand boutiques, which are suddenly flourishing with all the Chanel and Chloe bags coming through the door, sales tags still swinging. My heart does not go out to them.

The other day as a multi-millionaire’s wife in designer sweatpants and a rolled up gym mat tripped past me as I was stranded in traffic on the way to work, I felt more than the usual stab of resentment at the 9am pilates and latte set. As a PAYE drone about to be snookered by the emergency budget, I began to feel like one of those irate taxpayers who end up phoning Joe Duffy. Okay, the leisured set have their troubles too – it must be awful to have people glare at you in traffic. Even if you have taken the precaution of driving the au pair’s banger instead of the Audi, you can still be recognised.

There is no Riviera rebate for us. But small steps can be taken. In west Cork they generally know something that the rest of us don’t, so when an estate agent there told me that people are busy putting their holiday homes into their children’s names to avoid the impending property taxes, it’s safe to assume they have inside knowledge. Shift that leaky old cottage now to the next generation and save yourself some pain.