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Lord Anthony Bamford, a billionaire and Brexit advocate, is cutting his fortune from Curaçao to Lake Geneva. That should have something to do with the corporate tax adjustments in both places.
He likes to park money where the least amount is stolen: Lord Bamford.
Photo: PD
When Finance Minister Ueli Maurer suffered a crushing defeat in the Third Corporate Tax Reform in early 2017, Vaud was already much further ahead: a year earlier, his electorate had approved a similar adjustment to the internationally accepted tax regime. And so Vaud lowered his corporate income taxes to 14 percent in January 2019. Maurer, for his part, had to make a second attempt at the federal level with the Staf bill in May 2019 before he could implement the reform in early 2020.
It should therefore not be a coincidence that the Canton of Vaud is now one of the first to reap the benefits. As financial news portal Bloomberg reported on Tuesday, Lord Anthony Bamford is transferring assets equivalent to around 6 billion francs to a Lausanne-based holding company. Bamford and his family are ranked 27th among the richest British families on the Sunday Times Rich List.
JCB is in the Oxford Dictionary
Most of the explanation for wealth can be found in Lord Bamford himself, although his father Joseph Cyril Bamford played an important role in it. On October 23, 1945, their son Anthony was born the same day, he entered his excavation company with the simple name JCB in the company registry. They were his initials.
All three letters even have their own entry in the Oxford Dictionary. In the flourishing post-war years they had become synonymous with the word digger in Britain: it’s like Darvida for whole grain cakes, Kaffee Hag for decaffeinated coffee, or Labello for lip balm, the product name of which becomes a so-called synonym for a invaluable advantage in marketing.
The fact that JCB became a global brand was no longer due to JCB himself, but to Anthony. When he assumed the presidency of the company in 1975, when he was only 30 years old, he made money in his only factory in Rocester at West midlands sales of a few tens of millions. Today, it employs more than 12,000 people in 22 factories around the world and manufactures more than 300 products, from forklifts to generators. In 2019, sales were 5 billion Swiss francs. The profits over the decades went to the family that still owns the business today.
Curaçao also had to make its mark
And so Bamford rose over the years from head of SME to large industrialist, with all that that implies: in 1990, he was knighted by the queen. In 2013 he was included in the second House of Parliament, the House of Lords, that undemocratic anachronism of the kingdom. In other ways, Bamford participated in British democracy in the year of Brexit 2016, when he supported the successful Leave campaign with millions and arguments.
With all these honors, the fact that he had stationed his assets on the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao with its heavenly tax rates and thus withdrawn from the British tax authorities since the 1970s did not get in the way. Consequently, the clamor should not be great even now, when Curaçao also has to adapt to international standards and Bamford is turning its back on the island. After all, the state does not lose money that it did not lose.
