The winner of a £10 Million National Lottery jackpot has come forward to claim the lottery jackpot prize amount.
Camelot has avoided £10 Mil in tax
The lottery ticket holder, who is from the Bradford area of the United Kingdom, has last night stepped forward to claim the prize. At present, identity verification is taking place by the National Lottery.
There has been a huge campaign to ensure that the lottery game-winner of one of the first New National Lottery game Jackpot prizes gets their cash prize. At the present, the identity of the winner is not yet known. The reference to the New National Lottery game is, of course, due to the doubling of the price of a Lotto ticket from £1 to £2.
This has provided lottery players with bigger jackpots and increased prize payouts, it has also raised the hackles of many who have promised to boycott the new Lottery game. In addition, some National Newspapers and Politicians in the United Kingdom have labelled the increase in price as greedy and as an additional tax on the poor.
The Independent Newspaper seems to have taken a particular interest in Camelot who are the organisers of both the National Lottery game and EuroMillions. They are today running an article which claims that Camelot has avoided £10 Million in tax by making use of a legal loophole. The story does make for interesting reading as it seems that Camelot is not the only company making use of this loophole to avoid tax payments.
HMRC is aware of the loophole and has not done anything to close it up till now. The article claims that as much as £500 Million could have been lost to the public purse via this loophole. The fact that Camelot is now owned by the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, which is benefitting from this avoidance of tax, adds further rancour to the matter.
The Ontario Teachers Pension Plan is a large institutional investor with billions of Pounds worth of investments on its books. It seems that it is out to squeeze the National Lottery game in the United Kingdom for all it is worth.
The matter has been raised in the House of Commons with MPs now looking at the matter and looking at HMRC’s diligence in handling this matter which is shockingly poor it has to be said. HMRC seems to be all over small businesses, but when it comes to large multinationals they tend to back away from collecting revenues. We do hope that this changes.