Gary Barlow broke a four-month silence last night to apologise for investing millions of pounds in aggressive tax avoidance schemes.
The Take That singer, previously an avid Twitter user, posted his first message on the social networking site since May 7, days before The Times revealed that he and two bandmates faced a multimillion-pound tax bill after attempting to shelter £66 million in a tax scheme called Icebreaker.
“I want to apologise to anyone who was offended by the tax stories earlier this year,” he wrote on Twitter yesterday evening. “With a new team of accountants we are working to settle things with all parties involved ASAP.”
The singer explained that he had “taken a break” from the social networking site after his account was hacked by an internet troll who posted an offensive message about his family.
Barlow was revealed as an Icebreaker investor in June 2012. At that point, a tax tribunal had not ruled on the scheme, although Revenue & Customs stated on the record that it considered Icebreaker to be artificial tax avoidance.
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Almost two years later, a tax judge found that Icebreaker “was known and understood by all concerned to be a tax avoidance scheme. The aim was to secure [tax] relief for members, and to inflate the scale of the relief by unnecessary borrowing.”
By then, Barlow had been exposed as one of the largest investors in the offshore Liberty tax scheme. He poured more than £4 million into Liberty, which was described by experts as one of the most aggressive on the market.
The singer was introduced to the Liberty scheme by BWCS Partnership, a “boutique” tax company in Cheshire. Among 200 other clients put into Liberty by BWCS was Paul Nicholson, a rapist and loan shark who used Liberty to shelter £1.4 million of criminal earnings. Other Liberty investors included the singer George Michael, the actor Sir Michael Caine and four members of the pop group Arctic Monkeys.
On Twitter, Barlow confirmed that he was working on a new Take That album and explained that he had arrived back in Britain after “seven productive weeks” in the US.
The majority of Twitter reactions to Barlow’s apology were positive. “You’re only human and we all make mistakes,” one fan said. “You put your trust in someone and it was betrayed.”