[billy bleach]

Originally Posted by Mike Harte

chilli, we in the UK have a tax regime that from memory is called an IR 35 for those that provide their labours via limited service companies. It is basically supposed to stop self-employed workers from just providing services of one kind or another to just one company, and then paying themselves very little salary and/or just dividends which means that they escape having to pay National Insurance, and potentially a lower rate of Income Tax.

The theory is that only a maximum of 75% of the company's income can be generated from one source. And I would guess that someone with the high profile of a chap like Newey would be in the sights of HMRC to check that he is compliant. Now we also know that apart from designing Red Bull's F1 cars, he is also heavily involved in the Red Bull supercar project, and I believe that that is set up as a separate entity, therefore satisfying the 75% rule, or it is certainly possible that that could work on paper. Plus he does do some other smaller stuff besides Red Bull.

Newey would need certain safeguards or clause within any contract with Red Bull that doesn't tie him to only providing his labours to them, because the Revenue would be entitled to view that or those contracts, and they would come down heavily on him if he was purely tied to Red Bull. There may well be a clause that stops him from working with other teams whilst he is providing his services to RBR, but I would like to believe that that would cease the moment his contract ends with RBR.

This all seems a bit intrusive. What possible business is any of this on a Forum site?