The post you are reporting:
Mark - Are you suggesting that the two firms did not have their accounts drawn up under the correct accounting practises and codes? If so where is your proof? Without proof you are blowing in the wind. I am not an accountant personally (a bit too boring for me!) but I am quite certain that companies like these will have produced correctly prepared accounts from which the proper corporate taxes are paid. Any allowable expenses and offsets that may reduce tax are just that, allowable and in taking advantage of them the companies will have done nothing wrong or immoral. Exactly the same way in fact you would not have done anything wrong should you mitigate the impact of higher rate tax (or even basic rate tax) through the use of pension contributions, ISA investments and maybe investing cash in your wife's name should she be a non-taxpayer or a basic rate taxpayer. All legal and moral.
What bothers me Mark are the attitudes that seem to comes accross because these are the attitudes that gets this country into the economic mire time after time, that of seeing companies as something to be milked for as much tax revenue as you can screw out of them. In so doing you fail to see the revenue they bring to the country as successful business and through that success provide employment for many people (and income tax revenue through that).
Your attitude seems to be that public spending is superior and that governments know better than we or businesses how our own money should be spent. That is just wrong, we are not and should not all be serfs doing the bidding of the State. In fact the State causes at least as many problems as it solves and there is nothing morally superior about state spending at all.
In addition many people, ordinary people, benefit from their profits through having these successful companies in their pension schemes. Even I, with a high risk pension portfolio with just 40% invested in UK equities and mainly small and mid caps, have nearly 1% in Vodaphone, many pensions will have double that in my experience. There is nothing wrong or evil about businesses, whether big businesses or small businesses, their success is the key to all of us being better off.