Greene King set to launch appeal to HMRC over tax scheme

The newspaper reports that chief executive Rooney Anand has said he plans to take his appeal to the upper-tier tax tribunal, after an initial legal challenge to HMRC’s position on the tax scheme, known as Project Sussex, failed.
He told The Guardian​: “To accuse Greene King of being corporate tax dodgers à la Starbucks, Google, etc was a total surprise and a shock. It’s an insult to a 214-year-old company that is trying to prevail under the most difficult conditions – with some success, I might add – and that has paid many hundreds of millions of pounds in tax over the years.”
The newspaper reports that in a judgment handed down by the first-tier tax tribunal last summer, it was confirmed that Greene King knew “the true underlying purpose of the transactions [was] as a means, if it succeeded, of generating relief for the payments of interest made without corresponding liability to tax on the receipts”.