It’s been nearly two years since changes to the British “tax regime” forced Sir Martin Sorrell and WPP to pack up and move shop from London to Dublin, but now George Osborne, the recently installed Chancellor of the Exchequer for the UK, is personally reaching out to Sorrell and pleading for the advertising umbrella firm to return home.
According to Brand Republic, WPP’s move to Ireland, which the company had been considering since April 2008, has saved them around $75 million to date and reduced their effective tax rate by nearly 8 percent from 2008-2009.
Still, the report this morning states Osborne and the newly appointed government are looking to sweeten the deal for UK companies to return home, where the corporate tax rate is more than twice that of Ireland’s. Now that he’s done calling the ad industry out for wanting to cash in on the social web, maybe Sir Martin has some more time to contemplate WPP’s potential move. Though with British corporate tax form in its nascent stages, who knows how the hell long that will take.