IRC v. Burmah Oil Co. Ltd., the full name of which is Inland Revenue Commissioners v. Burmah Oil Co. Ltd., and its citation is S.T.C. 30, H.L..
In summary, companies that had made substantial capital gains had entered into complex and self-cancelling series of transactions that had generated artificial capital losses, for the purpose of avoidingcapital gains tax. The House of Lords decided that where a transaction has pre-arranged artificial steps that serve no commercial purpose other than to save tax, the proper approach is to tax the effect of the transaction as a whole. The decision is not limited to capital gains tax, but applies to all forms of direct taxation, and is an important restraint on the ability of taxpayers to engage in creative tax planning.
Facts (''Ramsay v. IRC'')
The important facts are set out in the following quotation from Lord Wilberforce:. The two assets in question were loans of equal amounts, which had an unusual condition: Ramsay Ltd. was entitled, once, to reduce the rate of interest on one loan, provided that the rate of interest on the other loan increased by the same amount. Ramsay Ltd. exercised this right, such that one loan became worth far more than its original value, and the other far less. The loan that had gained in value was disposed of in such a way that it was intended to be exempt from tax as "debt", while the loan that had fallen in value was disposed of in such a way that it was intended to be a deductible capital loss. Funding for the entire transaction was provided by a finance house, on terms such that the money would inevitably pass round in a circle, and back into their hands again, within a few days, with interest. The House of Lords rejected the idea that there was any exemption from tax under the "debt on a security" rule. However that was not the basis of their decision, which was a more far-reaching principle.
Facts (''Eilbeck v. Rawling'')
Some types of interests in trusts are "assets" of a kind that can be bought, sold, and be subjected to CGT. Other types of interests in trusts are not "assets" in that sense. The taxpayer in this case, Mr Rawling, tried to take advantage of that fact by entering into the following transactions:
# a Jersey trust, of the kind in which Mr Rawling's interest would not be a taxable asset.
It was a term of the Gibraltar trust that its trustees could make appointments of money to the Jersey trust.
On day 2, Mr Rawling bought a reversionary interest in the Gibraltar trust.
On day 3, The trustees of the Gibraltar trust appointed £315,000 to the Jersey trust.
On day 4, Mr Rawling sold his reversionary interest in the Gibraltar trust at its new market value, making a substantial loss since the asset was worth far less than it had been on day 2.
It was not a coincidence that the loss was a little under £315,000: just enough to cover an unrelated taxable capital gain Mr Rawling had made in the same year.
The court rejected the idea that there had in fact been any loss. Lord Russell said, quite bluntly: His reasoning was that Mr Rawling had an interest in the Jersey trust, anyway, so there simply had not been any loss on the sale of the interest in the Gibraltar trust. Also, all of the money needed to fund these trusts, and to purchase the interests in them, had been provided by a company called Thun Ltd., on terms that it would all be paid back to Thun Ltd. after the transactions had been completed. However the core of the decision was not related to the judges' disagreement with the detail of the taxpayer's case. Instead it was based on a more fundamental principle explained under "Judgements" below. Note that the facts have been simplified for ease of explanation, and that the actual transaction was rather more complex.
Lord Wilberforce described the transactions in the Ramsay and Rawling cases with this colourful simile:
Facts (''IRC v. Burmah Oil'')
In this case, the Burmah Oil group had suffered a genuine loss on the sale of an investment. However, the loss was not of the right kind to be deductible for tax purposes. Accordingly, the company's accountants and lawyers formulated a plan to "crystalise" that loss into a deductible form. They did this by entering into a series of inter-group transactions, the overall effect of which was that the loss already incurred became a deductible capital loss on the liquidation of one of the subsidiaries in the group. These transactions were made using Burmah Oil's own money, and were therefore quite different from the pre-arranged, marketed "schemes" using borrowed money in the Ramsay and Eilbeck cases. The judges were quite clear that they would have found in favour of Burmah Oil, and against the IRC, had it not been for the decision in the Ramsay case, some months before.
Judgments
In the Ramsay case, Lord Wilberforce distinguished three ingredients of the schemes involved
that there was a "clear and stated intention that once started each scheme shall proceed through the various steps to the end" whether admitted or implied;
that the taxpayer does not need to use his own funds, typically provided by a financial group with only the customer's security, and that by the end of the scheme his financial position is unchanged, so that "in some cases one may doubt whether, in any real sense, any money existed at all"; and
the key ingredient, that "it is candidly, if inevitably, admitted that the whole and only purpose of each scheme was the avoidance of tax".
Wilberforce summed up the emerging principle He ruled that in the particular facts of Ramsay The core of the Ramsay Principle is to be found in the Burmah Oil case in this remark by Lord Diplock:
Developments
More recent cases have tended to move away from a narrow focus on disregarding circular transactions and inserted pre-ordained steps with no commercial purpose. A number of tax counsel have cited the following comments by Ribeiro PJ in Collector of Stamp Revenue v Arrowtown Assets Ltd HKCFA 46, para 35 with approval as an authoritative statement of the prevailing view of the judiciary on the application of legislation in tax avoidance cases:
