An aggrieved board of directors at Barclays is hastily putting together a case for a last-minute taxpayer bailout of the bank to cover its dodged £500m tax bill, after Treasury officials finally put an end to the old regulatory system in which multinational corporations took Dave Hartnett, the head of HM Revenue and Customs, out for a most agreeable lunch and he repaid their largesse by obligingly writing off all their tax liabilities.
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| Dear, innocent little Barclays Bank |
“Barclays Bank is widely respected in the City as a paragon of probity,” explained Barclays’ head of corporate social responsibility, Sir Nick Things, “Which is why, when it became obvious that we were about to get done for years of tax fiddling, we immediately put our hands up and told the authorities about our £500m stash of loot. And we’d have gotten clean away, too, with if it hadn’t been for those pesky meddling kids at Private Eye jumping up and down and pointing to kindly old Mr Harnett for a year or two before the papers or the government finally woke up.”
“However, in our defence it should be pointed out that - unlike our competitors - Barclays didn't go cap-in-hand to the government back along, demanding an eye-watering handout and dragging every man, woman and child in the country into generations of unpayable debt,” he added. “I rather think it’s time to call that little favour in now, don’t you?”
Meanwhile, sweating Treasury officials are desperately pretending to be in meetings today as the phone rings and rings, trying to come up with some face-saving dodge whereby further deepening of the dark fiscal hole in which Britain now sits can be hidden from the taxpayer in some way, possibly involving vast, unpayable loans from Lloyds TSB and the Royal Bank of Scotland.
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