Crickhowell campaigners have just celebrated stopping a national supermarket opening on their doorstep, and now the town is setting its sights on the multinationals.
Businesses in the town are turning to the same tax techniques employed by some of the world’s biggest companies, and taking the town offshore for a BBC programme.
BBC Three’s The Revolution Will Be Televised, this film follows an alliance of local businessmen and women from the town in a unique theoretical TV experiment as they uncover the tax avoidance techniques multinationals employ, and try to apply them to their very own DIY tax plan.
How will the local traders - who run the salmon smokery, the local coffee shop, the adventure clothes shop, the optician, the book shop, and the bakery – get on with turning their local ledgers to mastering the accountancy schemes like those used by some of the biggest corporations in the UK?
Coffee shop owner Steve tells the programme: “I have always paid every penny of tax I owe, and I don’t object to that. What I object to is paying my full tax when my big name competitors are doing the damnedest to dodge theirs.”
Jo, who runs the local smokery in the town, says: “Until now, these complicated offshore tricks have only been open to big companies who can afford the lawyers’ fees. But we’ve put our heads together, and worked out a way to mimic these big tax dodgers. It’s jolly clever.”
The documentary will be screened next year.