A building company, payroll bureaus, and an accountant, barrister and physician all failed to pay over £24m in tax and face penalties of £16.3m
Over 130 companies and individuals have been named and shamed on HMRC’s latest deliberate defaulters list, with the worst offender evading a tax bill of £6.5m and facing a penalty of £4.2m. The amount of fines is up from the September list when the total penalties were £13.4m on £20.3m in unpaid taxes.
Blackburn based building company, Scott Norman McDonald Carlton, trading as Carlton Buildings according to HMRC, was involved in the renovation of commercial and residential buildings but failed to pay millions in tax. With no web presence, the company failed to pay an eye-watering tax bill for £6,526,563, which it now owes, and it has been slapped with penalties of £4.22m. This multimillion pound tax bill was racked up over seven months from January to July 2022.
Second on the list was Enigma Facilities Management Ltd, a provider of security services with various offices in Milton Keynes, Ilford and Barking, and now registered at an address in Maidstone. The company failed to pay a tax bill of £2.08m, and now faces penalties of £1.4m. The company kept avoiding paying tax sporadically over a three-year period, most recently from June 2021 to February 2022.
Inevitably Enigma went into liquidation in November 2022, five years after the business was set up in August 2018. Three directors resigned in the years running up to liquidation and the current sole listed director was appointed after the company deliberately avoided paying its tax bills. The liquidator’s report shows that HMRC was owed £2.49m in unpaid tax and £1.44m in penalties when it went bust.
Another million pound plus tax bill was owed by Staffscanner Payroll Bureau, formerly known as Apollo Payroll Bureau, which provided administration services and was based in Cardiff and Sheffield. Over an eight-year period from 2014 to 2022, Staffscanner ran up a tax bill of £1.41m, with penalties of £990,703. HMRC had secured a winding up petition against the company in August 2022 and the company was officially wound up in October 2023.
Almost on a par was Venatu Payroll Solutions with a tax bill of £1.34m racked up over three years from August 2018 to October 2021, and the company was slapped with a fine of £942,776. Venatu kept changing its name and was previously known as RTS Paurol Solutions and Bondix Administration. Now it has been wound up leaving liquidators to discover if there are any funds to settle the tax.
As usual a handful of restaurants made the list with Craig Minto, now disqualified director of the Sun Inn in Edinburgh, failing to pay £770,048 over a six-year period until 2017, resulting in a penalty of £481,280. Glasgow restaurant and bar, Life Glasgow, owned by Azure Grand Limited, owed £416,139 in taxes with a 100% penalty of £416,139 for deliberately failing to pay tax. Over in Wales, Magic Wok Mei restaurant in Glamorgan cooked up an unpaid tax bill for £172,257 with a penalty of £105,072.
A Birmingham accountant, Asgarali Rajabali, underpaid tax by £112,428 over a 10-year period from 2010 to 2020, and faced a large penalty of £105,682. Also on the list was barrister Gordon Robert Semple, who owed £134,120 with an accumulated penalty of £93,884, garnered over a three-year period. Consultant physician Haisam Rabie also racked up an unpaid tax bill of £135,818 from 2017 to 2020, with a penalty of £57,043.