American actor Mercer Boffey has lost a legal challenge to avoid paying council tax on his grade II listed property in Richmond.
Mr Boffey, who has appeared in shows like Ugly Betty, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and NCIS: Los Angeles, launched the bid two years ago, arguing that the tax should be scrapped for homeowners who use their properties for domestic purposes only.
He asserted in the High Court ‘the absolute right in every Englishman’, including an American living lawfully in England, to the ‘free use, enjoyment and disposal of all his acquisitions’.
But the judge ruled it was ‘simply wrong to say that a conventional dwelling — a privately owned house or flat, occupied for the purposes of living accommodation with no element of financial reward or benefit — fell outside the scope’ of council tax.
The judge noted that Boffey’s claim would ‘have rather stark consequences for the lawfulness of many billions of pounds raised by local authorities under successive governments for over three decades’.
