The companies eating up the publicly-funded NHS are unlikely to ever give anything back in tax, it has emerged today.

Analysis by Richard Murphy, a chartered accountant at Tax Research UK, found that Virgin Care Ltd, which has been quietly eating up large chunks of the NHS, is “unlikely to pay any tax in the UK in the foreseeable future”.

That’s because Virgin Care and its parent company Virgin Group is made up of 13 holding companies, some of them offshore, based in the tax haven of the British Virgin Islands.

It is the type of company structure that largely avoids tax liabilities, despite profiting heavily from income generated in the UK.

The Group, which whose principle beneficiary is Sir Richard Branson, is reported to have a net worth of £2.7 billion.

Last year Virgin Care won a £700 million contract to run 200 NHS and social care services to more than 200,000 people in Bath and north-east Somerset.

In March the company sued the National Health Service after the healthcare group lost out on a contract to provide children’s services in Surrey.

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