Do you remember before the credit crunch? Back in the day, when greed was still good, seemingly every City bonus round spawned a new crop of bizarre payment mechanisms designed to avoid tax, or more often, national insurance: gold bullion, fine wines, platinum sponge.

As one door shut, another apparently opened, until the government's responses became sufficiently generalised and the courts' understanding of these arrangements sufficiently realistic, to pretty well shut the activity down.