Phones4U founder: tax avoidance schemes should be stamped out

The businessman John Caudwell has vowed to shun tax avoidance schemes after using them to build his Phones4U empire in the 1990s.

Speaking to Lauren Laverne on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs, he acknowledged he had taken advantage of tax avoidance schemes in order to be able to invest more heavily in Phones4U when it was still a fledgling company.

But he added: “All of these tax fiddles, even though they were legitimate, need stamping out.”

Caudwell said he was “extremely proud” of paying into the UK system and would not use loopholes to save money again. “Would I do that again? No I absolutely wouldn’t, but I know why I did it at the time,” Caudwell told the programme.

His attitude towards tax changed as he began to develop a social conscience, he said. “There is a big groundswell of opinion out there among chief executives of public companies and smaller companies that the more tax you can avoid, the smarter you are,” he said. “There is a truth in that because you do have to be smart, but it’s wrong.”

Caudwell sold Phones4U, which was once Europe’s leading privately owned mobile phone group, for £1.5bn in 2006.

He has since set up a number of philanthropic projects including Caudwell Children, a children’s charity.

He drew attention this month when he issued an ultimatum to Boris Johnson over revelations about lockdown parties in Downing Street.

Caudwell, who was one of the Conservative party’s biggest individual donors at the last general election, told the BBC that the government’s “perceived arrogance” was “impossible to justify”.

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