As far as I can see this group consists of John Mansfield David Brown Dominick Hunter Albert Fisher Robert Wiseman David Lloyd Leslie
As far as I can see, this group consists of John Mansfield, David Brown, Dominick Hunter, Albert Fisher, Robert Wiseman, David Lloyd, Leslie Wise, Dudley Jenkins, Jacques Vert (is that a real name?) and my favourites, Horace Small and John Lusty. He has sold out, so the company is changing its name to BWI.Boring: companies that insist on being acronyms should pay a punitive tax. It also produced the lyric that gave the book its title.It comes from the show Sitting Pretty:In Bongo, it's on the Congo,And boy, what a spot.Quite full of things delightful,And few that are not.There no one collars your hard-earned dollars,They've a system that's a bear:When government assessors callTo try and sneak your little allYou simply hit them with an axe;It's how you pay your income taxIn Bongo, it's on the CongoAnd I wish that I was there.BARRY WEHMILLER was the biggest shareholder in the process engineering company that bears his name. No wonder he didn't like tax people.His battles come across in his books, where he likes to paint the criminal classes - be they safecrackers or earls stealing policemen's helmets - in a rosy light. His view on this and that of the Internal Revenue Service often differed.In 1936, for example, the IRS demanded $250,000 and tried to grab his American earnings: his accountants responded by inventing many of the tax-avoidance schemes that are now standard wheezes.One of these led Wodehouse to move to France in the 1930s, which in turn led to his internment by the Germans.
This, according to the new book You Simply Hit Them with an Axe (Tony Ring, Porpoise Books pounds 30), caused all sorts of problems. When Wodehouse got on the boat in New York, he had to produce a "sailing permit" to confirm he was up-to-date on his tax. P G Wodehouse was one of the highest-paid people in Britain between the wars, writing books and shows. Trouble was, he was also one of the first transatlantic commuters, earning part of his boodle in America and part in Britain. Have you wondered who to thank for these devices? May I direct you towards that great man, Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse.
There is no reason to believe he has lost his powers of prophecy.. IF YOU are one of those people weighed down by earnings from more than one country, you will know how handy it is to have double taxation treaties and a battery of accounting tricks to make sure that you cough up to the taxman only once. But it would be unwise to underestimate the failed local authority accountant's understanding of the power of technology - he has made pounds 22m by seeing the future before others did. He explains: "I would just issue electronic cash in the new currency, and it would close everything else out."All this may sound off the wall. And he says if he wanted he could "make monetary union happen by 1999 without any involvement by governments".
