Reform UK’s deputy leader Richard Tice is trying to just shrug off a tax scandal surrounding one of his companies despite experts saying laws were clearly broken.
The company in question is property investment firm Quidnet REIT Limited. Alongside Tice, there are two other directors, Nicholas Tribe and John Purcell, both of whom Tice has other business interests with.
Experts at Tax Policy Associates have insisted they are “confident that the company failed to withhold around £120,000 of tax”.
And this wasn’t optional tax as they asserted:
From 2020 to 2022 it paid around £600,000 of dividends to Mr Tice and his offshore trust. Quidnet was required by law to withhold approximately £120,000 of tax from those dividends and pay it to HMRC. But we believe it’s clear from the company’s accounts and public filings that Quidnet did not pay this tax.
They added:
Mr Tice has refused to answer the question directly, instead saying that he paid income tax on the dividends. That’s not an answer: the company was legally required to pay tax; the law doesn’t permit REITs to opt to defer their tax obligations.
In other words, the allegation is that Quidnet REIT Limited broke the law.
For Tice, however, it was just a “technicality”, he told the Sunday Times, who originally reported the story.
Meanwhile, Reform’s home affairs spokesperson, Zia Yusuf, called the issue “a minor administrative error” and a “non-story”. Yusuf seemed to minimise the alleged law-breaking by claiming “it does look like HMRC netted off in the same way”.
“Richard Tice has not committed tax evasion nor tax avoidance.”
Reform’s Zia Yusuf says allegations surrounding Richard Tice about his tax are a “non-story,” and states “the Sunday papers are coming after senior Reform figures,” as the election period looms.@TrevorPTweets pic.twitter.com/SqtQdNlYEt
— Sky News (@SkyNews) April 12, 2026
Richard Tice: Reform millionaires think rules are for other people
We already knew Tice was a fan of tax havens and using loopholes to avoid hundreds of thousands of pounds in corporation tax. He has made it clear that he thinks it’s completely normal and acceptable to do so.
Reform leader Nigel Farage, meanwhile, openly stated that he had bought a house in Clacton. But amid claims he had avoided more than £44,000 in stamp duty by putting the £885,000 property in his partner’s name, he backtracked. He insisted his partner had paid for it upfront with her own money (which the BBC said wasn’t a believable claim).
In Farage’s case, it wouldn’t have been illegal to give money to his partner so the house was in her name, but doing so to pay a lower stamp duty would have been highly hypocritical considering his boisterous criticism of Labour’s Angela Rayner for doing the same thing. Farage had said at a Reform conference that Rayner’s decision “screams of entitlement”.
It screams to a government that, despite all the promises that this would be a new different kind of politics, is as bad, if not worse, than the one that went before.
In reality, it looks like the wealthy white men leading Reform — who want tough laws for ordinary people on issues like immigration and benefits — also feel entitled to bend the rules when it comes to their own business. And it’s becoming clearer and clearer that they would make British politics even murkier than it already is.
By Ed Sykes
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