Stroud Targets TaxDodgers

Meet at 12 noon, Saturday December 18th
Outside Boots, on the High Street (no reason why we can't move on to other tax-dodgers...)

Download and print from the resources section from the UKuncut website (http://ukuncut.org.uk/), or make your own banners and placards.

Most importantly, bring yourself (and your friends and family if you can!)

We will be raising local cuts issues and support for local anti-cuts campaigns while on the streets (for instance, collecting signatures for 'Friends of Gloucestershire Libraries' petition to save local libraries - see: http://foclibrary.wordpress.com/)
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For a printable flyer (A6x4up on A4) on Boots: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15927156/boots-flyer.pdf

File on 4 (in a programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 26th October 2010) found that the chemist chain Boots, after relocating to a post office box in Switzerland, has legally cut its tax bill from over £100m a year to around £14m(20). It now pays tax at a rate of around 3% of its profits.

For information about Boots, try here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/feb/09/tax-gap-boots-chemists

Basic info: "In June 2007, the American venture capital giant KKR was able to pull off Europe's largest private equity deal. Together with an Italian entrepreneur, KKR bought the company for £11.1bn by borrowing £9.3bn from the banks and other investors.

It was the first private equity takeover of a FTSE 100 firm. The deal squeaked in with this enormous burden of debt just before the credit crunch brought such lending to a jolting halt....

Deep job cuts already announced before the bid continued after the buyout. About 900 were laid off in the UK, many in the headquarters in Nottingham. Unions said they feared asset stripping would hollow out what had been a profitable, tax-paying British company for over 150 years.

In June 2008, after more than a century and a half in the UK, the Alliance Boots group moved out of the country to Zug in Switzerland. Pessina, whose interest in the company Alliance Sante Participations is registered in another tax haven of Luxembourg, was quoted at the time as saying that the UK had become a "less friendly business location"."