Steve611, if it was a Business Man rather Warbird Enthusiast and it was close to the end of the financial year and the cigar man had a taxable profit for the financial year and was in the business of buying machinery and the machinery was on a ship that sunk then he could claim the loss as a tax deduction, in other words pay less tax than he ought to, and so indirectly recover his cash. Likewise if the machinery arrived and had missing pieces he could quickly sell it at a loss and get his money back via a tax write off, rather than deal with the complication of trying to sell damaged machinery to tyre kickers at ‘fair market value’. All this is theoretical, as in real life this would only be done by the Business Woman, who has now taken over the earth !

For your pleasure, the tax offset comes from consolidated revenue, which is you and you and you. Somebody else had to contribute tax to give the tax offset to the Business Man, otherwise the traffic lights would not work. So in fact you paid for the difference in price ! This is why the Business Man smokes cigars and you roll your own !

The only good news in this is that the Business Man is often not a good pilot, so tends to crash. I am still waiting for Trump to elbow some pilot out of the way, with a ‘you don’t know how to really drive this son’ !

All this talk of antipodean skullduggery is depressing. I don’t know anything about this story except for being drawn into it the same way as I am drawn into the marital problems of Brad and Angelina on a magazine cover in a supermarket queue. But I must defend fat, sleepy koalas from the raging British Lion with a thorn in its shoe ! If it wasn’t for Park then GB would be tucking into sauerkraut for breakfast ! All this could be amicably settled with a sword fight somewhere, and once somebody’s ear has been cut off, a glass of chartreuse. I trust my tax and conflict resolution advice may be useful.