In The Trustees of the Morrison 2002 Maintenance Trust and others v HMRC [2017] UKUT 300 (3 August 2017) the UT found that a sale of listed shares on the stock exchange could be the last step of a pre-ordained composite transaction.
The trustees had disposed of listed shares with a tax avoidance scheme which had involved the setting up of trusts in Ireland the grant and exercise of put options resulting in the acquisition of the shares by the trusts the sale of the shares by the trusts and the repatriation of the trusts to the UK. The FTT had found that the disposal of the shares amounted to a single composite transaction on which CGT was chargeable and the appellants contended that the FTT had erred in law.
The first issue applying Craven v White [1989] AC 389 was whether at...
