Avoiding tax isn’t ­criminal, but Rishi Sunak must realise it is unpalatable

Which is how, like so many ­American miscreants, Leone Helmsley finally met her match in the chaps from the US tax ­authorities. Though, of course, she ­managed to bargain down a lengthy ­sentence to months. You suspect her lawyers’ bill was one she DID manage to cough up for.

However Leone, now gone to the great ­accountant in the sky – via a mausoleum costing very many millions – did leave a useful legacy to humankind. It came in the shape of a catchphrase overheard by her housekeeper and recited at her trial.

Quoth Leone: “We don’t pay taxes, only the little people pay taxes.” This is also so in the UK, where there is a thriving ­industry in tax avoidance, which, unlike its even less savoury cousin evasion, is not illegal.

Lots of companies make lots and lots of money advising their clients on how their wealth can avoid scrutiny by the ­Inland ­Revenue (ultimate proprietor, the ­Chancellor). Less money of course than they save their wealthy clients, otherwise there would be copious corpses of golden egg-laying geese around the place.

By what I feel sure was absolutely a ­coincidence, the Institute for Fiscal ­Studies published a report last week ­confirming that inequality was on a rising curve, and that the top one per cent of the UK’s ­wealthiest inhabitants were doing rather well.

As in harbouring more assets than more than half of the rest of us put together. This is not an entirely British ­phenomenon of course.

When Donald Trump was ­reminding us that being venal, greedy and stupid was not necessarily a barrier to gaining the ­highest office in the land, he passed what he ­described as the most important tax cut in history.

It was certainly important for the ­highest of high rollers who could count their ­dollars in peace again, whilst his ­nation’s ­impoverished, not for the first time, ­realised that amongst the things which were ­unaffordable for them was getting sick. America, the land which thinks the National Health Service is a socialist plot!

READ MORE: Rishi Sunak listed as beneficiary of tax haven trust while he was Chancellor

Yet the UK still harbours the conceit, also prevalent across the pond, that if you fail in the lottery of life it must be because you are feckless and workshy and ­doubtless fiddling the benefits system out of the odd tenner while you’re at it.

And therein lies the clue to the ­furore which has accompanied the news that the wife of the Chancellor of the ­Exchequer chose to apply for non-dom status, ­(doubtless on the advice of one of the aforementioned tax specialists), thus ­absolving her from paying UK tax on ­foreign annual earnings. “Earnings” which, according to the Guardian newspaper, amounted to some £54 million-plus in seven years of dividends.

Post stushie, she suddenly remembered “British fairness”, and announced she would, after all, pay tax here on earnings from elsewhere for the last tax year and hereafter.

Yet she will still retain non dom ­status, we gather. Which will save her heirs ­hundreds of millions in inheritance tax. A very individual take on fairness.

We learn too the Sunaks recently both held US green cards, which require you to pay tax in America. And indicate it will be your “forever home.”

Friends point out with increasing asperity that Akshata Murthy has done ­nothing illegal. Indeed she hasn’t. Even should she have stashed some of all that stupendous wealth in offshore tax havens.

As an aside, you might well think it’s long past time these tax havens were ­outed for the scams they are. We’ve had three massive leaks in the Panama, ­Paradise and Pandora papers demonstrating just how many of the rich and famous choose to give the taxman a body swerve in the country where they work and dwell.

As the UK Government’s own tax ­guidance observes: “Tax avoidance ­involves bending the rules of the tax ­system to try to gain a tax advantage that Parliament never intended. It often ­involves contrived, artificial transactions that serve little or no purpose other than to produce this advantage. It involves ­operating within the letter, but not the spirit, of the law.”

You might readily gauge the extent of this contrivance when you learn that one solitary building in the tax ­sheltering ­Cayman Islands houses no fewer than 18,857 company “headquarters”. AKA brass plates of convenience.

Let us return to that important ­important phrase uttered by HMRC – “operating within the letter but not the spirit of the law”. This lies at the heart of why people are so incensed at the Sunak saga, and also why he and his wealthy ­colleagues fail to understand that rage.

People born into wealth or who ­inherit it, often lack the basic facility to ­understand the comprehensive misery of those who find the ends stubbornly unmet no matter how hard they graft, or how many jobs they take to put food on the family table.

It’s not an infallible law of nature, since, for instance, some hugely wealthy tycoons seek a cure for malaria whilst others prefer to incinerate their millions dispatching rockets into space.

But in general terms, people who pick up a lunch tab which in another life is an entire week’s benefit cheque, will perhaps never get their heads round the ­destructive effect of despair and ­poverty. And certainly not that they are the ­architects of much of it.

It is not the politics of envy, but the politics of social justice to observe that it is intolerable that people hire others to find ways to circumnavigate a tax ­obligation. “Only the little people pay taxes” and only the very wealthy decide not to ­bother, thank you.

The jury is out as to who found it ­useful to put the Sunaks’ somewhat ­alternative financial arrangements in the public ­domain. The chancellor found it ­politically safer to blame the Labour Party, without actually providing back-up evidence.

Others point the finger at his next door neighbour, since there surely can be ­nothing more irritating than a ­potential rival for your crown who is younger, smarter, fitter and thinner than your shambolic self.

All of that is chatter. What matters here is a culture which has grown up where it is not only defensible, but somehow almost obligatory to play the game of dodge the taxman.

It’s a corrosive culture and it has spread deep and wide across some of ­corporate Britain, and a huge tranche of top ­earners from footballers and celebrities to, ahem, the nearest and dearest of those ­politicians actually minding the tax shop.

People are not targeting your wife, Mr Sunak. They are targeting a system which tacitly encourages people to seek out legal means of cheating. Because, I’m afraid, cheating is how many ­ordinary ­taxpayers view a route to avoiding ­income tax whilst resident here, wherever that ­income ­originates and whatever legal loophole is exploited. It is not a good look, ­Chancellor.

Like so many activities of ­Westminster’s “finest” it’s not difficult to imagine how a similar situation would play out in ­Scotland, should any of our politicians from any party be found in ­possession of a stay rich quick scheme. Let us ­remember that the late David McLetchie was ­defenestrated for using a ­parliamentary cab to go to the dentist.

Were any of the current Scottish ­cabinet found to have exploited a means of tax avoidance, hell would have no fury like a Unionist media scorned.

We are not cleaner than clean in ­Scotland. Neither do we have ­government, or an opposition for that matter, too rich to care; too posh to ­understand that ­unaddressed poverty scars the whole nation.