The thing that suprises me most in all of this is just how Carr manages to blag £3 millions+ per year'"

I like Danny Baker's take on it:

[iDanny Baker ‏@prodnose

Wonder how many @jimmycarr tweeters are in Topshop using a Vodaphone bought via Amazon to express their 'tax-avoider' outrage.[/i

And it 5 posts it's back to Carr's problem.

Yes, and how unfunny he is.
I don't blame Carr or anyone for that matter offered these schemes.
The fact is that Cameron should do something about what is clearly bordering on tax evasion, but legal.
He'd stop his own tap and that of his mates though.
Meanwhile thank goodness for PAYE or we really would be shafted.
Sorry ... all of us on PAYE are shafted.

When did someone who left his child in a pub get to moralise about anything>

I appreciate as a comedian, people will expect me to ‘make light’ of this situation, but I’m not going to in this statement as this is obviously a serious matter.

I met with a financial advisor and he said to me “Do you want to pay less tax? It’s totally legal.” I said “Yes.”

I now realise I’ve made a terrible error of judgement.

Although I’ve been advised the K2 Tax scheme is entirely legal, and has been fully disclosed to HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs), I’m no longer involved in it and will in future conduct my financial affairs much more responsibly.

Apologies to everyone. Jimmy Carr

Via Twitter.

Surely there must be a servant who could "take one for the team" and be sacked?

Jimmy Carr is a very sharp comedian, one of the better ones to come on the scene of late. Has an edge, and doesn't give much of a fsck.

Credit to him for the above. Seems like a decent enough bloke to me.

Cameron though is an asswipe. The public purse has been utterly raped by banks and bankers, Vodafone and its ilk, with connivance of top staffers at HMRC (Private Eye has been on the case for years but nothing has been done about Hartnett's Vodafone deal). Carr is doing OK but really the tax he's likely to avoid is feck all compared with the trillions they could have gone after, but won't, for the simple reasons that (a) it's their mates that the deals are with and (b) that would not be the way to line up cosy jobs (like Hartnett) when they leave government or civil service.

Plus, HMRC had already at least several months ago made it well known that they were going to start looking closely at these schemes to see if they could close them down. (Which they could - it is to me a very clear scam, if you look at the reality of the situation) and even if they couldn't, legislation could be passed in a breath to do so, so singling out Jimmy Carr is just shameless showboating and sadly typical of the sort of people we now have 'running' our country.

Wonder what percentage tax Hartnett is now paying on his income?

At least, though, we will soon see a string of front page stories on the favourable tax arrangements of many leading Tories, who will no doubt be bollocking Cameron in private for poking a sleeping dog. I'd bet a pound to a penny that many of them are also into K2, which would be a damn interesting list, if someone would please leak it.

Now that is a good one.

If singling our Carr has that effect then that will be great. I think Carr is OK as a comedian but it's a bit rich (no pun intended) for him to be on a show like 10 O'Clock Live! that rips into the establishment and yet here he has been found out being as bad as them. He talk the talk but he doesn't walk the walk.

However that really is a side issue and if this gets more of who is doing this out into the open then all well and good.

As to legislation surely all that needs to be done is legislate what you can do to avoid tax and everything else is by definition classed as evasion?

So you can put some money into an ISA and you can get tax relief on pension contributions and that is it. Everything else is taxable and doing stuff like setting yourself up as a limited company when that is a sham just there for tax purposes is classed as evasion.

£3m isnt that much by the standard of today's comedians. Its a hugely lucrative profession, at least once they get on telly and graduate to the bigger arenas. They charge rock star prices but have only a fraction of the overheads. And its not hugely tiring so they can churn out the performances. Apparently Peter Kay made £20m from his last tour, he even took a cut of the car parking charges!

It used to be accepted that tax evasion was criminal, tax avoidance was ok. Now we have the added category of "aggressive tax avoidance". I'm not sure that someone like Carr would actually know where each category starts and ends.