When will the Guardian investigate the offshore trusts used by Guardian Media Group?

I wrote this piece last year when the Guardian published its first story about the Panama Papers, but if you substitute the word ‘Paradise’ for ‘Panama’ it could just as easily apply to today’s Guardian splash about the use by the Queen’s private estate of an offshore tax shelter in the Cayman Islands. If anything, this takes the Guardian’s hypocrisy to new heights. After all, the Queen is not legally obliged to pay income tax – she is a voluntary tax payer – so this could not be described as tax avoidance by any conceivable definition of the term, whereas the Guardian Media Group is obliged to pay tax and therefore its use of an offshore tax shelter in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying any tax on the £302 million in profit it realised from the sale of Auto Trader in 2008 was straightforward tax avoidance.

Needless to say, today’s Guardian contains a tub-thumping editorial