Daily Mail: Buy for £20m - and pay no stamp duty: How Candy brothers advised foreign buyers to avoid millions in tax on luxury flats

The flamboyant developers of Britain's most luxurious apartments planned to help foreign multi-millionaires deprive the Exchequer of up to £69million in tax. Prospective buyers of newly built flats at One Hyde Park in Central London, with an average price of £20million, were urged to opt for a corporate 'structure' when buying an apartment. This meant that instead of buying the property on a freehold or a lease and registering its sale price with the Land Registry, which would incur stamp duty, the purchaser would buy out the shares in a company that owns the property. These arrangements, which are not illegal, account for around 20pc of the high-end, multi-million pound property sales in London. Details of this stamp duty avoidance scheme will almost certainly concern Vince Cable....