Stampede of the entrepreneurs by Anthony Hilton, London Evening Standard

Normally this time of year would be taken up with auditing the accountants of clients with a December 31 year end, and sending out reminders to personal clients to use up their personal allowances, SIPPs, ISAs and so on.

This year though he has been rushed off his feet by people trying to sell out. He claims, and says it is without exaggeration, that perhaps a quarter of his corporate clients - and inevitably it is the brightest and most successful quarter - have put their businesses up for sale, or rushed through a transaction. None of these had displayed any desire to sell out until last autumn when Chancellor Alistair Darling announced his capital gains tax reform.

The prospect of the near doubling of capital gains tax from 10 % to 18% for entrepreneurs is what has sent them rushing for the exit. Darling has caused a whole generation of entrepreneurs to lose heart.

The capital gains changes have got a bit lost amid all the railing about non doms, but the reality is that they will probably do as much damage by the time they have run their course. This is not just because of the mass abandonment of business by those selling out but also because no one seems to have thought through what will happen when it becomes established that the top rate of capital gains tax at 18% is so much lower than the top rate of income tax at 40%.

I am old enough to remember when Nigel Lawson unified the two tax bands and regarded it as one of his most worthwhile achievements because it put a stop to all manner of artificial transactions designed to convert income into capital gain for tax purposes. Now they will all start again.

The supreme idiocy of Darling's so called capital gains tax reform is that it creates the opportunity and incentive for serious artificial tax avoidance where none previously existed.