It's not only whose phones he's tapped that Murdoch wants to keep hidden

It seems that whilst Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp are keen to know everyone else’s business they’re not so keen on shining a light on their own. And never more so when it comes to revealing how much money they’ve made in order to cough up some of it to pay for essential services. A fact revealed by Richard Murphy, author of a joint PCS, Tax Justice Network and War on Want tax haven report, when he joined Caroline Lucas MP and deputy general secretary Hugh Lanning to speak before a crowd of MPs in Committee room 7 of the House of Commons on July 12^th.

The author of the Tax Research UK blog revealed Murdoch’s multi-national corporation uses 152 subsidiaries in tax havens in “a deliberate construct to hide the truth.”  All of which the report calculates costs UK taxpayers at least £18000000000  [£18bn] a year in lost tax revenue, a figure four times bigger than the cost of eliminating child poverty in the country.

A sum of money that must surely have been of interest to Labour’s shadow Exchequer Secretary David Hanson MP and Stephen Timms MP, the shadow Employment Minister who were both sitting in the audience.

Caroline Lucas, the only Green MP in the House of Commons, now hopes to use the report to persuade other MPs to back her Tax and Financial Transparency Bill.