Lloyds accused of avoiding tax to artificially boost profits - papers

A former employee of Lloyds Banking Group has accused the bank of artificially inflating its profits by almost £1bn through the use of aggressive tax-avoidance schemes and exotic "Lehman- style" offshore deals which he said amounted to false accounting.

The former senior tax manager at the bank told an employment tribunal Lloyds was involved in running battles with Revenue & Customs after it embarked on a hostile relationship with the tax authority over multimillion-pound corporation tax bills while involved in extensive manipulation of the way it accounted for unpaid taxes, The Guardian reports. Between 2005 and 2007, he said, the bank insisted that finance staff devise ever more elaborate ways to depress a growing tax bill, many of them involving the now collapsed Lehman Brothers and the discredited financial products division of AIG,...