THIS WEEK, The BBC is reporting heavily on the secret wealth of the worlds power players including The Queen, Prince Charles and other global figures and companies that avoid tax through increasingly imaginative bookkeeping, but the BBC itself uses similar schemes to the ones they are expressing outrage over.
The BBC points to the Queen and Prince Charles and includes the Queens investments in medical and consumer loan companies and makes the significance of the Queen’s private estate, the Duchy of Lancaster apparent, but it seems the BBC should look closer to home when exposing tax avoidance.
After a short investigation, Politicalite discovered that the BBC’s Pension Scheme has millions of pounds heavily invested in the private equity market – and the majority are based offshore.
The BBC has £3.7 billion invested in private markets – that’s 24% of their entire portfolio, which is significantly larger than the Duchy of Lancaster’s absolute of percentage and value of investment in private markets.
They also have money invested with Carlyle and Warburg Pincus which are two of the world’s largest private equity firms in the market.
The BBC also has ties to Goldman Sach’s mezzanine fund, which helps finance some of the largest private equity transactions in the world and the BBC is linked to Bridgewater Associates and Prisma Capital – both Hedge Funds.
A source from The City also told Politicalite that most private equity funds are based offshore for tax and structuring purposes and told us that many of the BBC’s investments include investments in companies that are based offshore, Aberdeen infrastructure and HGCapital are both domiciled in Guernsey, Hony Capital and Navis are based in the Cayman Islands.
We also discovered that the BBC also has funds invested in Amazon. Amazon’s workers are exploited and paid the bare minimum wage for demanding work.
The company uses state-of-the-art technology to maximize the output it extracts from every worker and has been routinely cited for workplace safety violations and abuse.
“Pickers,” (Workers) who collect items scheduled for delivery, are required to wear tracking devices and routinely walk upwards of 15 miles during a shift. They are reprimanded and even fired by supervisors if their data shows any inefficiencies.