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Posts tagged Bad News
Labour Spent £134k on Sofas
Yes. This is why I did not vote Labour (no I didn’t vote conservative either). Hideous, mind numbingly stupid spending! At a time when the entire country, well the entire world actually, was feeling the wrath of a global economic crisis, a Government department bought 28 sofas at a price of £4,120 each.
The shocking-red “Alcove Highback” sofas, by Parisian designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, were ordered for the department’s central London headquarters at a total cost of £134,503. The revelation is part of a new investigation into Whitehall spending by the new Coalition Government, which found that Labour ministers authorised the purchase.
The sofas were aimed to create a “peaceful oasis” in the workplace, part of an efficiency initiative called “SpaceFlex” to make the department “more practical” and save money. Are you ******* kidding me?!? How stupid are you? Look I understand that you need furniture in the workplace. I understand that you want to create a nice workplace with some nice sofas even. But you are insane if you think that justifies spending over £4,000 per sofa! Especially when you are buying 28!! What decent retailer wouldn’t do you a good deal on 28 sofas?
We can’t afford nice things because you can’t run the country properly! So if you think you can take our money so you get nice things when you are not even doing a good job, you sirs are are the worst kind of ignorant! How can you ever justify spending tax payers money on 4 grand sofas? You can’t. End of. Jog on!
Manchester United Owners in Huge Debt
Manchester United are perhaps the biggest football (soccer for you yanks) club on the planet. But even that does not secure financial stability. An investigation by the BBC’s Panorama program into the clubs owners, the notorious Glazer family, have a net debt of £1.1 billion.
How do you get £1.1 billion in debt? Seriously? Only a mammoth level of ignorance could lead you down that path to epic failure. To be fair I do live in a country that is over £150 Billion in debt, but that is the collective of 65 million people. Fans of Manchester United have been against the owners since they bought the club in 2005. The years running up to the 2008 financial crash around the world were perhaps to worst to buy anything, and has seen the demise of many business and businessmen.
The Glazers debt had been no secret. When they purchased Manchester United for £831m, they borrowed £559m which it then loaded onto the club as debt. Over the past 5 years the club has since paid out a massive £460 million on interest, charges and fees on that debt.
The real revelation was that the Glazers are carrying £392 million of previously unknown debt relating to mortgages taken out on 63 of the 64 shopping malls owned by their company First Allied Corporation across the United States. This brings their total debt up to £1.1 billion.
You won’t see the Glazer family on any flights to Manchester any time soon. Fans of Manchester United are furious and fear that the massive debt will force a lack of investment into the clubs team.
“We have campaigned against the takeover because the Glazers have put not one penny into United, while taking huge sums out, and ticket prices have risen for ordinary fans to help pay for it. The revelations about First Allied appear to show they may not have money from elsewhere to invest in the club or pay down all the debts. It will all come from the club.”
Making (no) Sense of Tax Rates
Does anybody in this country actually know anything about tax? Does it really need to be this difficult to make money? I swear they have designed a system that is complicated only so that when you do overpay tax, it is so much hassle to get it back that you end up giving up!
I am not a big fan of the British tax office, or the tax rates. For the past 3 years I have been registered as self employed. That in itself need not be that complicated. But I was self employed whilst working full time in one job and part time in another. This then gets very confusing. I am paying tax for being self employed, despite earning under the threshold for income tax and national insurance, and then paying tax on the earnings I make in my other 2 jobs.
Yet when filling in my tax return online, I get nothing to tell me how much I should be paying or if I have over paid. In fact, last year I moved to Canada for 5 months, and on the day I got their I had a letter from the tax office telling me that my numbers were incorrect for my tax return 2 years previous. They claimed that I had not listed any of my employed earnings from that year.
For the tax year in question, I had earned £300 from my self employed work and the rest entirely from my employed work. Surprisingly enough, I did not forget to leave out 99% of my earnings as they claimed. I did in fact put everything in correctly and paid an extra £95 in income tax as instructed on completion of the return. If I had only listed the £300 self employed earnings as the Tax Auditor claimed, then I would not have to have paid anything.
When I tried to explain this to the tax office, after 2 months of them not answering the phone, I was told that they had no record of me paying anything for that year. Fantastic. It turns out that I actually agreed with the figures they claimed were correct, because they were the exact figure I used the first time. So I sent a letter agreeing that the figures were correct, however informing them that they have clearly lost 2 crucial bits of data from my original tax return of that year, my employment earnings that I did enter correctly and the fact that I already paid the tax due.
A month goes buy and rather than paying any attention to what I actually said they just sent me a new bill for £125. So here is essentially what happened for the first tax year where I was self employed: I earned £300, then paid £215 of tax.
As you can probably imagine, I am quite keen for the tax office to go and hide somewhere where the sun doesn’t shine, to put it very very politely.
Beware of the Bears
Not only can they smell menstruation from 6 miles away, they are now trained in Kung Fu! Run for your lives!
Lingerie Model in Suicide Bid
French supermodel Noemie Lenoir, best known for advertising Marks & Spencer lingerie in recent campaigns, is recovering after what appears to be a suicide attempt. She was found unconscious lying in a forest on the outskirts of Paris beside a pile of pills and an empty bottle of spirits.
It is believed the lingerie model called an ambulance for herself claiming she ‘felt very ill’ but then made a second call to cancel the ambulance shortly after. Friends suggested that Ms Lenoir’s turmoil may well have been linked to her relationship with multi-millionaire Carl Hirschmann, who is involved in a sex and extortion scandal in Switzerland. Hirschmann, a notorious playboy, has been accused by police of being involved in orgies with young models whom he is said to have plied with vodka-based cocktails called ‘Love Potion’ before videoing them in depraved sex acts.
She also has a 5 year old son with former Chelsea footballer Claude Makelele, and was at his £1million detached home on the day of the incident.
18 Million Brits Injured by Sex
Not all at once obviously. That would be madness. We don’t just go running around having massive sex parties you know. We have office jobs and Facebook poking to do. But when we do we are gentlemen (and ladies) about it. We go all out. Maybe splash out on some new lingerie for our better halves and get some candles to set the scene. Well maybe not. Whatever we do, this story makes it sound like we are doing it wrong.
Thinking of getting lucky? Better think twice, especially if its on your furniture.
Yes it was reported this week that around one third of the British people have suffered an injury while having sexual relations. 40% also admit to breaking a household item during intercourse. This suggest to me that we are either really rubbish at sexy times or we are strangely aggressive.
“Sex is a risky business these days. There are numerous hazards in and around the home which can inflict severe injuries if people aren’t careful. We were amazed to find out that even the bedroom can prove a hazardous location for certain people. Our advice would be to remove any dangerous objects well before you plan to start making love and take care while in the act.” Claims a spokesman from the survey.
Household furniture was deemed some of the more dangerous places to ‘do it’. The most recorded places of injuries was on sofas, followed by stairs, cars, showers and the bedroom.
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