From the Manawatu Evening Standard

http://www.stuff.co.nz/manawatu-standard/business/3613852/Sam-Morgan-defends-tax-comments

Trade Me founder Sam Morgan says he does not want to be portrayed as a tax evader and plans to give most of his money away in his lifetime.
He also reveals in a blog today that he paid about $25 million of taxable income last year into his charitable foundation, resulting in him having “almost no income to tax”. Earlier this week NZPA reported that Mr Morgan, 32, had said in an interview on the SciBlogs website that he paid “basically no tax… And that’s not right, but what am I supposed to do?”

Finance Minister Bill English told reporters that Mr Morgan could “just write out a cheque to IRD” if he was feeling uneasy about the tax laws.
Mr Morgan is estimated to have made at least $227m from his $700m sale of Trade Me to publisher Fairfax Media in 2006.

On his blog samfromwellington.posterous.com, Mr Morgan said today: “I did not intend to be commenting publicly about my tax situation or tax policy, but I’ve decided to in a blog post rather than be painted as a ‘rich ******’ or tax evader.”

He wrote that he had built a company that paid of millions in corporate taxes every year. Now Fairfax Media owned Trade Me it paid those millions from Trade Me profits.
While Trade Me was paying dividends, all shareholders paid tax on those. “Where New Zealand is out of line with most other countries is in the absence of taxes on capital gains. If I had sold Trade Me in Australia, the US, UK, Canada or most other places, I would have paid taxes on the capital proceeds,” Mr Morgan said.

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