‘In this world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.’ So wrote Benjamin Franklin in 1789.
Fast forward to September 2013 and after a process that has been over three years in the making we can now add another certainty – tax relief for the cost of decommissioning offshore oil and gas operations in the UK North Sea. For earlier this month at a speech in Aberdeen George Osborne unveiled the (very nearly) finalised decommissioning relief deed (DRD) for the North Sea – a contractual regime separate from tax legislation to provide such certainty to industry.
The chancellor stressed that: ‘Never before has any [UK] government entered into legally binding contracts with individual companies to guarantee the tax relief they can expect decades into the...
