I often hear the refrain that billionaires and corporations just use legal tax gimmicks to avoid paying a fare share in taxes, and that if you want to hold someone accountable, point your finger at the politician who votes for the tax loopholes that makes tax dodging legal and possible. I get the politician’s responsibility–but only up to a point. Because there is a morality issue at stake here…uh, oh yeah, morality and business don’t coincide, as John Malone proves.

Malone is the chairman of Liberty Global and, per Citizens for Tax Justice, “a world-class tax dodger”:

Last year Malone’s Liberty Global, the largest international cable company, “moved” from Colorado to London through a merger with Virgin Media. The merger was structured as a corporate inversion, a tax-dodging gambit much in the news lately. Although Liberty gives its London office top billing on its website, the company didn’t actually move its headquarters to London—it’s still run primarily out of the company’s office in Colorado.

…

Aside from Liberty Global’s current and future tax savings expected from the paper move, Malone is estimated to have personally escaped $200 million in income taxes in the inversion deal which generally subjects the shareholders to income taxes on their capital gain. He did that by transferring $600 million of his stake in the company to a charitable trust the day before his company announced the inversion deal and by twisting Treasury regulations into a pretzel to avoid tax on the remaining $260 million piece.

The greed that says Malone—whose estimated net worth exceeds $7.5 billion—can’t even pay 20 percent in capital gains tax (compared to a 35 percent rate on wages) on his $860 million dollar gain is truly unimaginable to me. And that we have laws that allow tax avoidance on this scale is deplorable.

Deplorable is right.