"Tesco £1bn tax avoiding plan - move to the Cayman Islands" and building a "Megashed" near Stonehenge

That is the headline on the front page of "The Guardian" today. Apparently, Tesco has set up a large number of companies in the tax-haven of the Cayman Islands and, via a complicated set of accounting procedures, is managing to avoid the payment of perhaps up to £1 bn of UK tax.

The Guardian says: "Tesco's vast property portfolio in the UK has been crucial to maintaining its dominant position in Britain, where it takes almost £1 in every £3 spent on groceries. Now the supermarket group has set up a network of highly complex structures involving offshore tax havens to sell and lease back some of its £28 billion-worth of stores that will enable it to avoid what could be up to £1bn in corporation tax".

The full story is
here

Also, Tesco is planning an ENORMOUS warehouse near Stonehenge and adjacent to the A303.
Details of that story
here

In part, that story says:

"On a greenfield site just outside Andover, Hampshire, Tesco is planning to open a warehouse which, at more than 85,000 sq metres (21 acres), will be one of the biggest buildings in Europe. It will be bigger than Heathrow's terminal 5 and the height of four double-decker buses, each stacked on top of the other.

Every minute of every hour, day and night for 364 days a year, an average of one Tesco juggernaut will roll in or out of the so-called MegaShed.

Suppliers bringing in goods destined for Tesco's stores are likely to produce as much heavy goods traffic again. About half the lorries, according to the developer, will head east towards London and the M3 - back in the direction from which most of the goods have arrived. One in five will head down the A303 past Stonehenge, where the road becomes a single carriageway. Plans to build a Stonehenge bypass, complete with a tunnel, were thrown out by the government in December."

Wonderful news if you own Tesco shares - not such good news if you travel down from London on the A303!