Hargreaves in the Court of Appeal: a return to orthodoxy on withholding taxes?

Hargreaves Property Holdings Ltd v HMRC [2024] EWCA Civ 365 ranks among the most important withholding tax cases in many years. Certainly few if any recent cases have raised quite so many withholding tax points for the tribunal to decide.

In both the First-tier and Upper Tribunals ([2021] UKFTT 390 (TC) and [2023] UKUT 120 (TCC)) the taxpayer lost on all of these points. But particularly on the question of whether a UK company was ‘beneficially entitled’ to the interest payments the Upper Tribunal adopted what in our view was a radical extension of the ‘beneficial entitlement’ concept in UK domestic tax law. We each wrote articles for this journal last year discussing the impact of the Upper Tribunal decision (‘Withholding tax:...