[Ammi]

DJ Chris Moyles claimed to be a second-hand car dealer while presenting Radio 1’s Breakfast Show in a bid to save up to £1million in tax, a tribunal ruled yesterday.

He now faces a whopping bill after a tax judge said he did not believe the former Radio 1 star had been buying and selling used cars.

Last night Moyles publicly admitted his ‘mistake’ and said he had ‘learnt a valuable lesson’.

But he has fought hard to hush up his use of tax avoidance schemes.

When it emerged in 2012 he had used the same legal offshore scheme as comedian Jimmy Carr, who was paying as little as 1 per cent, Moyles claimed it would breach his human rights if he could not keep his membership secret.

Separately, Moyles, 39, was one of 450 celebrities, fund managers and other top earners to try to avoid tax by taking part in a scheme called ‘Working Wheels’.

It worked by allowing members to say they had incurred huge fees while working in the second-hand car trade, which they could claim back against their tax bill.

On the self-assessment tax return he filed for the financial year ending in April 2008, when he was presenting the BBC Radio 1 show, he claimed he ‘had engaged in self-employment as a used-car trader’.

He claimed he had made a loss of £1million, but a tax tribunal ruled this was just a ruse to save tax

It found that, far from being a car dealer, Moyles had never supplied any vehicles and had ‘no interest’ in doing so

Nor did he have the faintest idea how much the cars he was supposedly trading cost to buy and to sell.

When HM Revenue and Customs rejected the scheme, Moyles and two other members appealed to a tax court

Yesterday, tax judge Colin Bishopp rejected the appeal, saying it was clear he ‘entered the scheme for no purpose other than to achieve a tax saving’.

He said the ‘scale of Mr Moyles’ borrowing was driven solely by the amount of the tax loss he wanted to achieve, in his case £1million.

The ruling said Moyles was ‘anxious to be reassured the scheme was lawful, and that he would not have to undertake any trading himself’.

Moyles later took to Twitter to say: ‘Upon advice, I signed up to a scheme which I was assured was legal. My knowledge of the dealings of the scheme were naive. I’m not a tax expert and acted on advice. This was a mistake and I accept the ruling without reservation.’
But he was not so keen to speak about the case when he still hoped to win it. During his year-long battle with the taxman, Moyles desperately tried to keep his avoidance scheme secret.


His legal team argued the tribunal should be heard behind closed doors so as not to infringe his ‘right to respect for his private and family life’.

His lawyer also said if his membership were exposed, ‘his career might be damaged’. As Breakfast Show host, he earned £500,000 a year.

Judge Bishopp rejected this on the grounds there was an obvious public interest in keeping tax cases public


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