Beyond the companies: the owners of capital, and the people who write the rules

The rest of this site explains how big companies move profit out of reach of the taxman. This part goes one layer deeper, to two things the corporate story leaves out. First, the people who own the capital, and the separate, gentler tax treatment their wealth receives. Second, the people who write the rules, and the documented routes by which well-resourced interests reach them. The arithmetic still does the talking. We just follow the money one step further back, to the owner and to the rule-maker.

A company is owned by someone. When a corporation pays a low effective rate, that is one part of the picture. The other part is how the owner of that corporation, or the manager who runs other people's capital, is taxed on what they take out. These are different tax systems sitting side by side, and the wealthier you are, the more the second one matters.

This cluster is deliberately distinct from the rest of the site. Elsewhere we describe mechanisms that move corporate profit. Here we describe the personal and political layer: how wealth is held and extracted tax-efficiently, and how tax policy is shaped. It is more sensitive ground, so the rule is stricter than ever. We describe the people and firms involved by their role, from a register, an official inquiry, a court or a regulator, and we link to that record; the underlying sources are named at the foot of each page. Everything else is the system, in the dock.

The four things this cluster covers

• The personal regimes for the wealthy. A regime that, until April 2025, let UK residents pay no UK tax on foreign income kept offshore. And the long-running treatment of fund managers' profit share as a capital gain rather than as pay. Read more
• The private equity model. How buying a company with borrowed money turns the interest bill into a tax deduction, how managers are paid, and why the model is built for extraction. Read more
• Who shapes the rules. The documented record of who reaches ministers and officials: lobbying access, the revolving door between Treasury and finance, and the cleanest public-record case of all, a Big Four firm that leaked confidential government tax plans in Australia. Read more
• Who actually pays instead. When mobile capital pays less, the bill does not vanish. It shifts. To whom, and by how much, is a genuinely contested question in economics, and we set out the real disagreement rather than pick a winner. Read more

Why this matters to a small business

You cannot become a non-dom on a plumber's income. You cannot have your pay reclassified as a capital gain. You cannot load your company with acquisition debt to manufacture an interest deduction, because nobody is buying your company with a billion pounds of borrowed money. And you do not have a seat at a donor forum with access to the Cabinet. The tools on these pages are not from you. They are structurally above you. The point of following the money back to the owner and the rule-maker is to show that the gap you feel is not an accident of your accounting. It is built into who the system was designed around.