Week Ending: The plight of Sefton Park Meadows; the mysterious tax cheat

LIVERPOOL City Council announced this week that Redrow was its preferred developer to build upmarket homes on Sefton Park Meadows.

The sale of the six-acre site, which it hopes will raise £10m, is subject to planning approval of a future Redrow application.

First mooted in March last year, the plan has triggered opposition from campaigners who say they will fight any development.

The council wants the cash because it is being forced to make savings worth £156m over the next three years due to central Government cuts. It must also be attracted by the prospect of more council tax from large homes.

But the sale of the meadows is short-sighted in a city with swathes of brownfield land which needs to be developed. Admittedly, much of it is in parts of the city that would not attract “executive” buyers. But surely the challenge is to create new upmarket areas, rather than devalue existing ones.

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HMRC last week named a Manchester-based firm called Saad Victoria Food & Wine as the country’s worst tax offender, having been wound up owing HMRC more than £29m.

This is quite a feat considering the firm, registered at Chancery Place on Brown Street in the city centre, was only incorporated three years ago and never filed accounts. Most of the liability, £27m, came from the three months from November 2012 to the following January.

It is hard to comprehend how it racked up such a figure, but it was a wine merchant which suggests the large liability could have been down to unpaid excise duty, rather than corporation tax.

The sole shareholder was 43-year-old Ayub Mohammed, an Indian national who resigned as a director in 2012, and whose other business interests are located in the South East. The directors at the time of the liquidation in May were Gaurav Kimothi, 36, and Wakil Abdul, 42. HMRC could not shed any more light on the case.

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