Brady, who has been with West Ham since January last year, said in her daily football column in The Sun newspaper that Tottenham’s bid for use of the Olympic Stadium is “an attempted smash and grab in our manor, sneaky and of no known benefit to anyone beyond their backers and major shareholders.”
She went on to say that those major shareholders are “not based in the UK and don’t pay UK tax”.
West Ham itself was previously majority owned by Iceland-domiciled CB Holding ehf which held a 35% stake up until January last year.
The tax status of business owners and, more importantly, the UK’s MPs has become a hot-topic in the years since the financial meltdown of 2008, particularly now austerity measures, including tax hikes and cuts to services have been imposed by the government.
In July last year an Act was passed in the UK which prevents anyone from sitting in the House of Lords unless they are domiciled in the UK. In the run-up to the implementation of the Act a number of Lords gave up their peerage in order to maintain their non-domiciled tax status. However some, most notably Lord Ashcroft who had courted controversy for years by not publicly declaring his tax status, decided to relinquish their non-domicile status.
There was further furore when retail tycoon Sir Philip Green, owner of the Arcadia Group of companies, was appointed by David Cameron as a “waste watchdog”. There have been accusations that his wife, to whom Green has signed over most of his business empire, is a tax exile and that the companies themselves have avoided paying huge amounts of tax to the UK government.
