Message:

<p>[QUOTE=&quot;afantiques, post: 2078504, member: 71234&quot;]I have spent the last 25 years as an antique dealer. I have bought large amounts of both coins and general silver (and gold) objects at auction and from runners and private sellers. I have never paid any VAT apart from the VAT on the buyers premium at auctions, and this is factored into&nbsp; the top bid price I am willing to pay. </p><p><br /></p><p>The margins would be slim, unless I got lucky and the other dealers missed something, but it would not be an infrequent thing to buy several thousand pounds worth of mixed silver items at an auction and flip them the same day at my bullion dealer&#039;s shop for maybe a hundred pounds profit, small pickings but no real risk or work involved. </p><p><br /></p><p>One staple purchase would be 1970s sets of silver ingots or rounds, which I&#039;d consistently buy for less than melt and sell to a private buyer for spot silver price. That buyer paid no tax. </p><p><br /></p><p>Specialist coin auctions such as Warwick and Warwick could supply stacks of material, such as modern silver NCLT coins and gold bullion coins for about the melt price. This is all a far cry from the odd item from a car boot sale.</p><p><br /></p><p><i>By and large, the folk selling modern silver coins bought their stock from somewhere</i>. </p><p><br /></p><p>Yes, from the sources I have mentioned, but they&#039;d not be paying any tax to the sellers, because in most cases the sellers would be non VAT registered people. Lots entered by VAT registered traders into auction would be marked with an asterisk to indicate VAT was payable on the hammer price,in which case you&#039;d simply bid enough less to cancel this out. Selling PM&#039;s at auction is a mug&#039;s game because of the huge costs to the seller, but there is an unending supply of mugs willing to do so, usually because they know no better or want to clear an inheritance into cash with the minimum of effort.</p><p><br /></p><p><i>Unless they smuggled them in from somewhere abroad without tax on silver, they paid tax on them on import or VAT when they sold them.</i></p><p><br /></p><p>There is no need to smuggle anything, and it is no interest if a buyer paid any tax to anyone a decade or more ago. Or even last week. What they get is the market price, and this does not include any tax.</p><p><br /></p><p>The VAT registration threshold is about £70.000 per year turnover. And that&#039;s turnover anyone knows about, cash deals tend to leave no trace for the taxman. </p><p><br /></p><p>Unmentioned so far is the fact that I could buy all the silver I could afford from my bullion dealer for cash over the counter for maybe 5% over melt, with no tax involved.</p><p><br /></p><p>Anyone paying tax on PM purchases in Britain is simply doing it wrong. I really have no idea why tulipone is so dogmatic about this, I&nbsp; have no desire to &#039;troll&#039; anyone, just stating the facts from my quite extensive experience.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

Your name or email address:

Do you already have an account?

• No, create an account now.
• Yes, my password is:
• Forgot your password?

Stay logged in