Michelle Mone's husband accused of £5.5m Spain tax swindle

14.01.2023 - 08:15 / dailyrecord.co.uk

Tory peer Michelle Mone’s billionaire husband took part in a scheme to suck millions out of a company in a massive corporate tax fraud, prosecutors allege.

The Record has seen a copy of the four-page indictment against Doug Barrowman and six other British businessmen due to stand trial in Spain next May for corporate tax evasion and misappropriation.

The 57-year-old insists he has committed no wrongdoing and is being prosecuted simply because of his minority shareholding in the firm which paid a disputed invoice.

We told how he faces up to five-and-a-half years in jail if convicted on two charges.

The indictment claims the Scot and two other investors attended a pair of 2008 meetings when payment of the €6.3million (£5.5million) invoice was “ratified” and company accounts approved.

Spanish prosecutors claim they therefore “consciously permitted” the alleged scheme to go forward while knowing the invoice payment was “destined for their own personal benefit”.

The prosecutors will likely probe his links to Axis Ventura, the UK firm the €6.3million invoice was paid to in July 2008.

His lawyers say he wasn’t an Axis shareholder or director when the invoice was created and paid.

Axis raised €18.8million through Landsbanki to buy B3 Cable Solutions Spain, a cable plant near Santander, which went bust in 2012.

Court papers date Barrowman’s “disconnection’ from Axis to March 18, 2008, around four months before the invoice was settled and subsequently partly used to cut B3’s corporation tax bill.

The corporate tax deduction was just over €1.6million.

Prosecutors say Spain’s Treasury was defrauded out of more than €0.5million. The indictment also called for B3 to be reimbursed with €6.3million.

The indictment, referring to three men