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Aston Villa offer to move to wherever new manager already lives

ASTON Villa have confirmed they are not expecting their new manager to move to Birmingham and are happy to go to him.

The club, who are in the relegation zone, have admitted that it is unreasonable for any boss to be expected to take on the twin miseries of the club and living in the West Midlands.

Chairman Randy Lerner said: “Don’t let the commuting thing put you off. If you’re willing to manage us, we’ll do the rest of the work.

“London? No problem. Madrid? Suits us. Florida? Australia? Leicester? Seriously, the way things are, we’d consider relocating to Leicester.

“In fact, we don’t have to be a football club. Maybe we could be a multiplex cinema. Or a go-kart track. Or a carpet warehouse. Up to you.

“We’re not interviewing for the position. We don’t want anyone to have the chance to think twice.”

So far, the only activity around the vacancy was Tim Sherwood calling the police after spotting the 42,000-capacity Villa Park lurking in the bushes at the bottom of his drive.

HMRC thought tax evasion email was ‘special offer’ from bank

HMRC failed to act on a whistleblower’s tax evasion email because they thought it was a marketing campaign.

Hervé Falciani alerted the authorities to HSBC’s alleged tax evasion services in 2008, but officials dismissed it as just another spam email from the bank offering ‘exciting opportunities to save money’.

An HMRC spokesman said: “We get these sorts of emails all the time. HSBC has been trying to sign our staff up to tax evasion for years. So we tend to just read them and then delete them.

“Can you imagine if someone connected with the government had actually used HSBC’s services? That would be quite the state of affairs, would it not?”

HMRC have now offered to re-examine the email ‘to see how different it was from the other HSBC emails’.

The spokesman added: “We want to see whether it had lots of exclamation marks and included phrase ’this is not marketing campaign’. If it didn’t then it’s really not our fault.

“Also, the guy who sent it sounds like he might be French.”

 

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