Spire Healthcare is a subsidiary of private equity company Cinven. Most of Spire's profits are syphoned off to pay interest on the £1.3 billion loan that Cinven took out to pay for the acquisition of Spire in 2007. This removes £108 million from the operating profit of £123 million. But there is still £15 million of taxable profit left, which should have equated to £4.2 million paid to the tax man. Just £1 million was paid and even this amount was only salvaged by HMRC because some of Spire's expenses were “not deductible for tax purposes”.



So that's £3.2 million in missing tax revenue. Spire managed to steer this money away from the grasp of HMRC by paying interest on debts it owed to yet another company; Rozier. Now, Rozier are based in the low tax jurisdiction of Luxembourg and just like Spire are - would you believe it - a subsidiary of the private equity company Cinven. The interest Spire paid on these loans totalled £65 million. After taking a small cut of this sum, Rozier then passed the money on to Cinven as a tax deductible (HMRC can't touch it) dividend payment of £64 million.



All of which means Spire Healthcare managed to post a loss of £53 million whilst her parent company Cinven enjoyed receiving a cool £64 million, completely tax free.

Taken from Corporation Watch's 'An Unhealthy Business' report