Sharpy 🛸

Two days before he died in 2018, Ken Dodd married Anne Jones, his partner of 40 years, and that wedding kept about £11 million of his £27.5 million estate away from HMRC. In the UK, whatever you leave to a husband or wife is free of inheritance tax, so all of it went to her. Thirty years earlier the Inland Revenue had put him on trial for hiding £336,000 in cash around his house, and lost. The video below is that 1989 trial at Liverpool Crown Court, told by the people who sat through it. The court heard he had kept pound and five-pound notes in shoeboxes under beds, in cupboards and in wardrobes from the 1960s to 1981. In evidence he blamed his fear of banks, of what the Labour government of the 1970s might do, and of what he called 98 percent tax. From 1979 he started moving the cash offshore, flying from Speke airport in Liverpool to Jersey and the Isle of Man with suitcases of five-pound notes. By 1984 he had about £700,000 spread across 20 offshore accounts. He told the court he had thought the interest was tax-free, and that banks outside Britain were none of the taxman's business. The prosecutor, Brian Leveson, called him devious and deceitful. His barrister, George Carman, gave the jury the line people still quote: "Some accountants are comedians, but comedians are never accountants." The jury found Dodd not guilty, and the courtroom cheered. Winning still cost him. He paid the Revenue more than £800,000 in unpaid tax and penalties, and with his legal and accountancy bills he was close to bankrupt. Asked on camera how much the trial had hurt, he says "very much", "because I know in my heart of hearts that I am an honest man." Then he admits he is probably "an untidy person". He went straight back on stage and introduced himself as a "failed accountant", and kept touring for most of the 29 years he had left, still living in the same house in Knotty Ash. Anne Jones had been with him since 1978. They married on 9 March 2018, and he died at home 2 days later, aged 90. For me the Revenue had a fair case in 1989. Hundreds of thousands in shoeboxes and 20 accounts he never declared look like more than untidiness, and the £800,000 he paid afterwards says he owed something. The wedding in 2018 broke no rule at all. If you live with a partner and you're not married, only the first £325,000 of what you leave them is free of inheritance tax, and the rest can be taxed at 40%. The Inland Revenue spent 5 years on him and lost the trial, and 29 years later a wedding kept about £11 million from HMRC. Was Ken Dodd an honest, untidy man the taxman should have left alone, or a man who kept his money from the taxman twice and got away with it both times? I post one story like this every day: a famous name, the money they made, and who ended up with it.