Morrisons faces £17m invoice over rotisserie rooster row | EUROtoday

Supermarket chain Morrisons faces a £17m tax invoice after dropping a authorized problem over whether or not VAT needs to be charged on its rotisserie chickens.

The first tier tribunal dominated that entire cooked chickens offered by the Bradford-based retailer needs to be topic to the usual 20% VAT charge utilized to sizzling meals.

Morrisons claimed it was exempt from the so-called “pasty tax” – an added 20% VAT on sizzling meals – as most clients consumed the cooked chickens chilly or reheated them later.

However, a tribunal choose mentioned HM Revenue & Customs had not dominated the chickens to be zero-rated for VAT and Morrisons didn’t disclose key info about particular packaging it used to manage the meat’s temperature.

The tax was launched in 2012 and clarified the VAT therapy of sizzling baked items.

The transfer prompted an enormous outcry, with critics accusing ministers of waging class warfare towards pasty eaters.

Mr Osborne later staged a partial climbdown by exempting merchandise which are left to return to “ambient temperatures” on cabinets in bakeries and supermarkets.

In his ruling on the Morrisons dispute, tribunal choose Mark Baldwin mentioned the grocery store had “failed to disclose the heat and grease/fluid retention features of the chicken paper bags”.

He mentioned the agency had additionally didn’t report “the fact that (cool-down rotisserie chickens) were taken off sale after two hours, whilst they were still well above the ambient temperature and were not on a cooling trajectory that meant that they would only be ‘incidentally hot’ when sold”.

A Morrisons spokesman declined to touch upon the ruling.