‘Beneficial ownership’ and ‘beneficial entitlement’ are pervasive concepts in UK tax legislation. They determine inter alia whether companies are in the same tax group and as discussed by the Court of Appeal (CA) recently in Hargreaves Property Holdings v HMRC [2024] EWCA Civ 365 whether tax should be withheld from interest payments. Some of the most common examples of where beneficial ownership and beneficial entitlement crop up in practice are set out in the table below.
In dismissing the taxpayer’s appeal the CA did not need to break new ground. However Falk LJ’s judgment offers a pithy refresher of previous case law on beneficial ownership.
This article revisits the familiar ground retraced by the...
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