-
Dec 16, 2024 | 
thebureauinvestigates.com | Ed Siddons
The collapse of the Assad regime in Syria has sent shockwaves around the world and marks the end of a dictatorship that has left the state in tatters. As well as brutal repression during the country’s decade-long civil war, the charges against the Assad family include systematic corruption on a staggering scale. Members of the family have allegedly looted hundreds of millions of pounds from the Syrian people.
-
Dec 16, 2024 | 
theguardian.com | David Pegg |Ed Siddons |Rob Byrne |Meriem Mahdhi
An uncle of the recently ousted Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad used an adviser in Guernsey to secretly manage his wealth, which includeda vast European property empire worth hundreds of millions of euros that prosecutors claim wasacquired with funds looted from the wartorn state. Rifaat al-Assad, known as the “Butcher of Hama” for overseeing the violent suppression of a rebellion in the 1980s, has been accused of war crimes by Swiss prosecutors.
-
Nov 22, 2024 | 
thebureauinvestigates.com | Ed Siddons
A sexual abuser; a wealthy businessman; a landlord “offering substandard and potentially dangerous accommodation to vulnerable people”; a “wealth creator”. All of them silenced scrutiny by using the threat of a lawsuit against their critics, a cross-party group of MPs argued in Parliament on Thursday. The debate was prompted by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s (TBIJ) Silenced Stories project.
-
Aug 16, 2024 | 
thebureauinvestigates.com | Ed Siddons
The UK’s largest law firm sought £1.1m in legal fees from climate campaigners to cover the costs of preventing their protests, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism can reveal. DLA Piper, a multibillion-pound law firm, tried to recoup eye-watering costs, including fees of £350 per hour for providing legal advice to its clients HS2 and National Highways Limited (NHL) – both publicly owned bodies.
-
Aug 1, 2024 | 
thebureauinvestigates.com | Ed Siddons
At 10am on December 1 last year, I took my seat at a long boardroom table surrounded by frosted-glass walls, in the towering offices of a London law firm. I felt like Attenborough in the natural habitat of the City lawyer. The meeting had been called to finalise a legal defence on which hundreds of thousands of pounds rested. I did not want to be there.
-
Jun 19, 2024 | 
thebureauinvestigates.com | Ed Siddons
HMRC squandered the chance to hold a notorious promoter of tax avoidance schemes to account after making a “rudimentary” error at tribunal, new documents reveal. According to a recently published tax tribunal judgement, the UK tax authority was attempting to bring a £14m penalty against Paul Baxendale-Walker, a former lawyer and tax adviser. HMRC estimates his schemes to have cost the exchequer some £1bn in lost taxes according to a separate court filing.
-
Jun 16, 2024 | 
thebureauinvestigates.com | Ed Siddons
The UK’s tax authority has not fined a single “enabler” of offshore tax evasion or non-compliance in five years despite landmark powers introduced in 2017, new figures reveal. Industry experts criticised HMRC’s approach as “bizarre” and “bloody pointless” in light of the data, which was released under freedom of information laws to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ).
-
Feb 18, 2024 | 
thebureauinvestigates.com | Ed Siddons
The number of civil tax avoidance leads looked into by HMRC’s Fraud Investigation Service has fallen by almost half in five years, while the number of civil cases it has formally opened has decreased by more than a quarter. These figures, obtained by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) under Freedom of Information laws, raise questions about the tax authority’s performance since the start of the pandemic.
-
Jan 20, 2024 | 
thebureauinvestigates.com | Ed Siddons
HMRC has not charged a single company under landmark legislation passed six years ago to crack down on corporate tax evasion. Critics say the data, released after Freedom of Information requests by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and TaxWatch, suggests that HMRC is undermining its own deterrents against corporate tax evasion by failing to use its criminal enforcement powers.
-
Dec 1, 2023 | 
thebureauinvestigates.com | Ed Siddons
One morning in April 2017, Jen McAdam was scrolling through emails in her council house in central Scotland when she saw one from an unfamiliar address. It had an attachment, which she opened. When she read it she thought she was going to faint. McAdam had been through a rough few years. In 2010 she had developed chronic fatigue syndrome, rendering her effectively bedbound. The small IT consultancy she had started folded. She burned through her savings.
