Mr. John McCarthy:

Rather than referring to one company I will respond to the more general point. I am straying into my colleague's territory but I will give the economic rationale. We have a relatively low headline rate, but we apply it to a very broad base. Many institutions such as the IMF would say that is the correct approach because it does not distort incentives and so forth. As the Chairman mentioned earlier we have published analyses of eight or ten different ways of measuring the effective rate. Depending on how it is done our effective rate is about 9% or 10%. If one looks at page 295 of the Comptroller and Auditor General's report, one will see many countries which have very high headline rates. These countries are quite happy to talk about the headline rates but, because of various exemptions and so on, their effective rates are much lower. We are much more transparent. There are far fewer loopholes. We have a low rate but the base is very broad. That is the correct approach from an economic perspective.