When the starter raises the tape for the Grand National on Saturday afternoon, Frankie Dettori will be in the thick of the action out at the Dubai World Cup, including the world’s richest horse race which he won 25 years ago in a pulverising performance which remains that chase’s most unforgettable.
One tour operator has been promoting a drinks evening with him in Dubai this week as the headline attraction of a five-day trip based around the Meydan meet. The cost of that trip? A cool £2,000.
For his longevity, for his personality, for his extraordinary judgment of the pace of a race, everyone has wanted to hear Dettori and be in his company over the years.
At a recent dinner in central London, Mick Hucknall stood up and serenaded him with Holding Back the Years. It was some moment. Not many people say ‘no’ to Frankie.
It’s when money comes into the equation that affection for Dettori is far harder to sustain.
Given he has been riding winners for billionaire owners for 35 years, the 54-year-old will have earned himself £20million at a conservative estimate. Yet racing is currently absorbing the news he is bankrupt, after His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) deemed a tax avoidance measure by which he saved millions to be illegitimate.
Frankie Dettori has been declared bankrupt over a tax avoidance measure deemed illegitimate
Mick Hucknall serenaded him with Holding Back the Years at a recent dinner in central London
Dettori has advised people ‘to take a stronger rein over their financial matters’, no pun intended
Dettori said he was ‘saddened and embarrassed’ but has fobbed off responsibility onto others
Dettori, who has moved to live and work in California, said he was ‘saddened and embarrassed’ by this, though adroitly fobbed off responsibility onto others. He advised people ‘to take a stronger rein over their financial matters’, presumably with no pun intended.
The implication being he wasn’t the one who had messed up. He had seen and known nothing.
The strategy, which a financial ‘adviser’ proposed, involved making large ‘tax-deductible’ payments, over five years, into a trust which then made large ‘non-taxable’ payments back to him.
They call this ‘disguised remuneration’ and HMRC deemed the trust a sham.
‘He signed some documents and claimed that, even though nothing really changed, he now owed a lot less tax,’ said Dan Neidle, founder of Tax Policy Associates, an independent tax think tank. ‘The idea the payments to the trust were tax-deductible is beyond stupid.’
Dettori has certainly been a busy man over the years, with horses to race, his £3m Arts and Crafts Grade II-listed country house outside Newmarket to maintain, appearances on I’m a Celebrity and BBC’s A Question of Sport to juggle and the restaurant chain he co-owns with Marco Pierre White to run.
He doesn’t have a forensic grasp of all of life’s smaller details. Asked to rearrange the letters TRINKET RIDE OAF into the name of a famous sportsman on one A Question of Sport anagram round, he failed to identify his own name.
But he certainly knows a bit about tax and its avoidance.
Dettori is a busy man these days but doesn’t have a forensic grasp of all of life’s smaller details
Dettori appeared on ITV’s I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here in 2023 but lasted just 12 days
Dettori wrote with pleasure in his autobiography about a friend having ‘seen off the taxman’
Lester Piggott, jailed in the late 1980s for failing to declare more than £3m to HMRC, was a hero and mentor of Dettori’s, whom the rider’s own father told him he must emulate.
Dettori relates with pleasure in one of his two autobiographies how another friend, Barney Curley, sold his house in a raffle ‘and saw off the taxman when he inevitably came sniffing around’.
When it came to his own tax arrangements there could not have been a more atrocious scheme promoter than the one he – or those acting for him – selected.
It was Paul Baxendale-Walker, struck off as a solicitor in 2007 for selling such doomed dodges. Rangers Football Club, restaurateur Michel Roux, vulnerable pensioners – Baxendale-Walker has stung them all.
He was declared bankrupt in 2018, by which time he had long been making and starring in pornographic films. His activities have been featuring in newspapers since 1997.
Dettori’s advisers were banking on HMRC not spotting the scheme in his tax returns. He was in his pomp and in the spotlight, earning more money than at any time in his career. You really couldn’t make this stuff up.
Dettori has focused on the financial stuff when it has suited him. When it was suggested to him, at short notice, that he appear on ITV’s I’m a Celebrity in 2023, his logic was that he merely had to last 25 days ‘to get the full amount of money they’ve agreed.’ He was first out, after 12 days.
The stench of greed – including his own – permeates this story.
Dettori’s advisers were banking on HMRC not spotting the dubious scheme in his tax returns
Dettori was in his pomp and in the spotlight, earning more money than at any time in his career
Sources have suggested it remains possible Dettori will race once more at Royal Ascot in June
Sportspeople should know they are a top target for HMRC, Simon Andrews of High Performance Individuals (HPI), which helps footballers plan a financial future, tells me. ‘Their lack of financial knowledge, the lack of good practice and lack of good people around them makes them an easy target,’ he says.
Some sources suggest it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that Dettori will race once more at Royal Ascot in June; that he has enjoyed the seclusion of the Californian coffee shops but misses our big stages. He will certainly find adulation if he does come back. Meantime, he could earn £5.3m if he rides the outsider, Mixto, to victory in Dubai’s feature event on Saturday.
Let no one overlook the fact that Dettori’s status as bankrupt affords him some financial consolations. It means HMRC cannot collect all the tax he avoided, at a time when this country needs every such penny it can get and when the average working person has no choice but to pay it at source.
‘Embarrassed’ by bankruptcy, Frankie? You certainly should be.
Williams is a sad, cautionary tale
I watched Brandon Williams look like Manchester United’s future left back of choice in a 2-0 win at Burnley, five years ago.
Spatial awareness, box-to-box running, pointing out to Anthony Martial precisely where he wanted the ball played through to him – he had so much.
Reading back my report, including Williams’ man-of-the-match rating, I see someone had told me the then 19-year-old needed reining in.
‘The word from inside Carrington is that his occasional disposition to lose his head on the training pitch needs to be managed,’ I wrote.
When I watched Brandon Williams in 2019 he looked like Manchester United’s future left back
Williams is now without a club after a 99mph car crash and a conviction for dangerous driving
Now clubless and with any prospect of an elite career over, after a 99mph car crash and conviction for dangerous driving, it strikes me that if Williams had gone into the same sport as his cousin Zelfa Barrett, the former super featherweight English boxing champion, then this might have been a different story.
There would have been less tolerance in a boxing gym for his preening, self-indulgent Instagram pictures.
But Williams, now 24, is one of those who attract trouble wherever they go.
In their relentless quest for better value, United – and football – should take a harder look at how many kids get too much too soon and their need of the right influences and liaisons when away from football.
