DID NOT PAY TAX.

Star (Christchurch), Volume XLIV, Issue 456, 18 May 1932, Page 5

DID NOT PAY TAX.

Robbing Fellow Citizens, says Judge. EVASION AMOUNTS TO £15,300. The wealth of a former rate collector, who, earning £4OO a year, possessed property which brought him in £13,300 in 1929, was disclosed at the Old Bailey when Arthur John Priest, aged sixty, of Clapham, S.W., who pleaded guilty, was sentenced to three years’ penal servitude for making false returns of supertax and income tax. Priest collapsed on hearing the sentence, and groaned: ‘‘Oh, no, no. I have not done that. Don’t say that; oh, oh.” He had to be carried from the dock. Mr G. D. Roberts, prosecuting, said that the amount evaded was £13,000 in super tax and more than £2OOO in income tax, but £15,300 had since been paid, so that nothing was now owing. Priest had owned 240 properties in various parts of London, and eighty ground rents. He had £38,000 on deposit at the bank when the proceedings started Mr J. D. Cassels, K.C.. on behalf of Priest, said that full disclosure had been made by him for a period of seventeen years, and it had been indicated that the £15,300 which had been paid was his full liability. He had reached his position almost entirely through his own efforts. He had been abstemious and modest in his manner of living, and very saving. As far as his rate collecting was concerned, he was above suspicion. . p Pasing sentence, Mr Justice bwnt said; “ You have pleaded guilty to a series of crimes which showed that for many years you have been deliberately robbing your fellow citizens. Every time you took a sovereign from the Commissioners of Inland Revenue you were not robbing them; you were robbing the taxpayers of this country.”