Celebrities and football managers "are among almost 200 members of a huge tax avoidance scheme" preparing a "landmark" £100M ($133M) legal action against three banks and a Hollywood studio, according to Alexi Mostrous of the LONDON TIMES. The investors "allege that Barclays, Bank of Ireland, HSBC and Disney misrepresented the chances of the Eclipse film investment scheme delivering tax breaks," with the result that many now face "huge tax bills and possible bankruptcy." Eclipse offered 780 individuals the chance to shelter £2.2B in taxable income by "buying and renting back Hollywood blockbusters such as Enchanted to studios such as Disney." In April, the U.K. Supreme Court confirmed that Eclipse 35, one of the biggest partnerships, "was a tax avoidance scheme." Former ManU Manager Alex Ferguson and former England managers Sven-Göran Eriksson and Glenn Hoddle "were among the Eclipse investors." They declined to comment and "it is not known whether they are part of the action group." U.K. tax authority HMRC "is calculating the tax owed on Eclipse." If it adopts one method of calculation, an investor who put in £200,000 could face a tax bill of between £2M ($2.7M) and £4M ($5.3M). David Greene, the senior litigation partner at Edwin Coe, the law firm representing the investors, said that there was a case to be made that "people were misled on a wholesale basis." Greene: "They thought, and were advised, that they were investing into film-backed investments that had potential tax advantages. Now the whole façade presented appears to have been fictional" (LONDON TIMES, 10/31).
