Articles tagged as Tax Law
Latest Law Papers tagged as Tax Law
Including law essays, dissertations, problem questions, case summaries, and law lectures, suitable for law students working towards their LLB / LLM qualifications or those studying for the new SQE.
Melluish v BMI (No 3) Ltd [1996] AC 454
Case Summaries
The House of Lords distinguished ownership of fixtures from contractual removal rights and the separate statutory route to capital allowances. It remitted the timing of expenditure for findings on individual transactions. ...
Last modified: 4th Nov 2026
BBC v Johns [1964] EWCA Civ 2
Case Summaries
The BBC lacked Crown immunity, but its unspent broadcasting grant was not a taxable profit. The Court of Appeal distinguished that surplus from profits earned through trading. ...
Last modified: 4th Nov 2026
Commissioners for His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs v BlueCrest Capital Management (UK) LLP [2026] UKSC 18
Case Summaries
HMRC treated most members of BlueCrest, a hedge fund management LLP, as salaried members taxable as employees. The Supreme Court held that only influence derived from members' legally enforceable rights and duties counts under Condition B. It also held that profit-related bonuses based on personal performance are 'disguised salary' under Condition A. Background The appeal […] ...
Last modified: 4th Nov 2026
Orsted West of Duddon Sands (UK) Limited (now named Orsted Schroders Greencoat WODS Holdco Limited) and others v Commissioners for His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs [2026] UKSC 12
Case Summaries
Orsted claimed capital allowances for the cost of environmental, metocean, geophysical and geotechnical studies used to design offshore windfarms. The Supreme Court held that such studies were not expenditure 'on the provision of plant', because the phrase requires a close connection between the expenditure and the plant itself. Background The respondents, members of the Orsted […] ...
Last modified: 4th Nov 2026
Commissioners for His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs v HFFX LLP [2026] UKSC 17
Case Summaries
Partners in a forex trading LLP deferred part of their profits through a discretionary corporate-member scheme, hoping to pay corporation tax rather than income tax. The Supreme Court held that section 850 ITTOIA did not apply. However, the deferred receipts were taxable as income from a ‘source’ under section 687. Background HFFX LLP was a […] ...
Last modified: 4th Nov 2026
AXA Insurance UK PLC and another v Commissioners of Inland Revenue and another [2026] UKSC 24
Case Summaries
AXA group companies, follower claimants in tax group litigation, sought to rely on a Prudential test case decision later shown to be legally wrong. The Supreme Court held that courts may, exceptionally, order that such a decision does not bind follower claims, and dismissed the appeals. Background The appeal concerned the Controlled Foreign Companies and […] ...
Last modified: 4th Nov 2026
ScottishPower (SCPL) Limited and others v Commissioners for His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs [2026] UKSC 35
Case Summaries
The Supreme Court held that ScottishPower could not deduct about £28 million paid to customers and charities when calculating trading profits for corporation tax. The payments were made under settlements with the energy regulator after investigations into serious breaches. Although each settlement imposed only a £1 penalty, the payments stood in place of substantial fines […] ...
Last modified: 4th Nov 2026
News Corp UK & Ireland Ltd v Commissioners for His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs [2023] UKSC 7
Case Summaries
News Corp sought zero-rating for digital editions of its newspapers for periods between 2010 and 2016. Its printed editions qualified. The issue was whether readers buying access to editions on electronic devices were receiving “newspapers” within the legislation then in force. The supplies and the question The digital titles included The Times, The Sunday Times, […] ...
Last modified: 4th Nov 2026
Moulsdale t/a Moulsdale Properties v Commissioners for His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (Scotland) [2023] UKSC 12
Case Summaries
Mr Moulsdale sold a let commercial property in 2014 without adding VAT, and HMRC later assessed him as if the price had included it. The difficulty was circular drafting in the land option-to-tax rules: they appeared to make VAT due only if he did not expect the buyer to pay it. The Supreme Court held […] ...
Last modified: 4th Nov 2026
London Borough of Merton Council v Nuffield Health [2023] UKSC 18
Case Summaries
Could a charity claim business rates relief on a gym whose membership fees excluded people of modest means? The answer depended on two different questions. Public benefit was assessed by looking at Nuffield Health’s charitable purposes as a whole. For the Merton Abbey premises, the council had to establish what the charity actually used the […] ...
Last modified: 4th Nov 2026
Commissioners for His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs v SSE Generation Ltd [2023] UKSC 17
Case Summaries
A hydro-electric scheme needs underground passages to bring water to its turbines. Whether the cost of building them qualified for tax allowances turned on two everyday words in a statutory list. HMRC treated the passages as tunnels or aqueducts. The Supreme Court read those words alongside the other structures on the list and held that […] ...
Last modified: 4th Nov 2026
Target Group Ltd v Commissioners for His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs [2023] UKSC 35
Case Summaries
Target sent instructions that automatically moved money through the banking system. Did that mean Target itself provided a VAT-exempt transfer service? The answer turned on what changed the legal position of borrower and lender. The Supreme Court examined both the payment instructions and the entries Target made in the loan records. What Target did and […] ...
Last modified: 4th Nov 2026
Commissioners for His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs v Vermilion Holdings Ltd (Scotland) [2023] UKSC 37
Case Summaries
A software company granted a replacement share option during a refinancing. By then, the person benefiting from the option was its executive chairman. Was the gain taxable as employment income even if the company’s commercial reason for the grant was to replace an earlier entitlement? The answer depended on a provision that treats certain options […] ...
Last modified: 4th Nov 2026
Hurstwood Properties (A) Ltd and others v Rossendale Borough Council and another [2021] UKSC 16
Case Summaries
Two councils sought business rates from landlords who had granted leases of empty premises to companies with no assets. The leases were genuine under property law. The question was whether they also made those companies the people entitled to possession for the purposes of business rates. Non-domestic rates are charged on the occupier of property […] ...
Last modified: 4th Nov 2026
Balhousie Holdings Ltd v Commissioners for Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs [2021] UKSC 11
Case Summaries
Selling a care home need not mean giving up every legal interest in it. The question for VAT was whether Balhousie Care Ltd had at any point ceased to hold an interest when it sold the building and simultaneously took a 30-year lease of it. The care home and the financing Balhousie Holdings Ltd is […] ...
Last modified: 4th Nov 2026
Commissioners for His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs v Fisher and another [2023] UKSC 44
Case Summaries
A family-owned company sold its telephone betting business to another company in Gibraltar. HMRC assessed members of the family on profits of the Gibraltar company. Under the version of the transfer-of-assets-abroad legislation governing those tax years, the question was who had transferred the business. Shareholding and the ability to benefit from profits did not by […] ...
Last modified: 4th Nov 2026
R (on the application of Haworth) v Commissioners for Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs [2021] UKSC 25
Case Summaries
A follower notice tells a taxpayer that an earlier ruling disposes of the claimed tax advantage. Mr Haworth challenged a notice based on a decision involving another trust. The question was how certain HMRC had to be before it could use that decision against him. The follower notice regime and Mr Haworth’s arrangements Under the […] ...
Last modified: 4th Nov 2026
Commissioners for Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs v Tooth [2021] UKSC 17
Case Summaries
HMRC could understand exactly what Raymond Tooth was claiming because his advisers explained it in the free-text boxes of his return. Yet they had deliberately used the wrong box to enter the amount. Did that make the return deliberately inaccurate and open a twenty-year period for assessment? Mr Tooth claimed an employment-related loss against income […] ...
Last modified: 4th Nov 2026
Tinkler v Commissioners for Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs [2021] UKSC 39
Case Summaries
HMRC posted the notice opening an enquiry into Mr Tinkler’s 2003/04 return to a house he had left, and he never received it. His accountants nevertheless dealt with HMRC for years on the shared assumption that a valid enquiry was under way. The Supreme Court held that he was estopped from denying, after the time […] ...
Last modified: 4th Nov 2026
Test Claimants in the Franked Investment Income Group Litigation v Commissioners for Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs [2021] UKSC 31
Case Summaries
This stage of the Franked Investment Income litigation concerned how to put right the effects of an earlier UK tax regime on overseas dividends. Recovering tax that should never have been charged is different from compensating a company for paying tax before it was due. That difference mattered both to the available interest remedy and […] ...
Last modified: 4th Nov 2026
FMX Food Merchants Import Export Co Ltd v Commissioners for Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs [2020] UKSC 1
Case Summaries
Could HMRC collect customs duty on Chinese garlic more than three years after importation? The papers wrongly stated that the garlic came from Cambodia. FMX itself was not implicated in the fraud. Under the Customs Code then in force, the decisive question was whether the debt resulted from an act capable of giving rise to […] ...
Last modified: 4th Nov 2026
Zipvit Ltd v Commissioners for Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (reference to the Court of Justice) [2020] UKSC 15
Case Summaries
Royal Mail and Zipvit had priced postal services on the mistaken assumption that they were VAT-exempt. Could Zipvit nevertheless deduct VAT as input tax when it had received no invoice charging it? In this 2020 judgment the Supreme Court explained why it needed the Court of Justice to interpret the VAT Directive before it could […] ...
Last modified: 4th Nov 2026
Cardtronics UK Ltd and others v Sykes and others [2020] UKSC 21
Case Summaries
The sites of cash machines in shops raised two distinct business-rates questions. Was a particular site a separate unit of property, and if so, who occupied it? Even where an ATM site could be separately identified, the shops in these appeals retained paramount occupation. The banks did not receive separate assessments. The questions before the […] ...
Last modified: 4th Nov 2026
Fowler v Commissioners for Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs [2020] UKSC 22
Case Summaries
A South African resident diver who worked on the UK Continental Shelf argued that a UK rule treating certain employed divers as if they were carrying on a trade also changed how the UK–South Africa double tax treaty applied to his pay. The Supreme Court disagreed. On the assumption that he was an employee, the […] ...
Last modified: 4th Nov 2026
The Advocate General representing the Commissioners of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs v K E Entertainments Ltd [2020] UKSC 28
Case Summaries
The Supreme Court dismissed a bingo operator’s appeal seeking repayment of VAT accounted for between 1996 and 2004. The operator had used a game-by-game calculation in line with earlier HMRC guidance, but the only correct method was session-by-session, so the excess was tax that was not due. Recovery was barred by the three-year limit in […] ...
Last modified: 4th Nov 2026
