Hybrids: making sense of the draft guidance

The draft guidance on the hybrid mismatch rules (all 404 pages of it) was finally released by HMRC on 9 December 2016 a mere three weeks before the legislation came into force. In fairness to HMRC its task in putting together this guidance was not assisted by a number of late changes to the legislation on top of the delays to the Finance Bill schedule in 2016 resulting from other political developments.

Nonetheless it is still disappointing that the draft guidance for the most part simply paraphrases the legislation and does not offer much in the way of insight or clarity on several points of concern to practitioners despite the fact that the legislation had a fairly lengthy gestation period of around two years from its announcement to becoming...