Stamp duty loophole coming to an end

Malcolm.

Why would an overseas company need to hold uk residential property and of what benefit is it to the uk?

I'm against transaction taxes in principle. I think they're unfair, unhelpful and lead to both illiquidity and distortion within the property market.

If keeping and collecting stamp duty. The government will need corporations to be more transparent, the only way to do this is new laws forcing all companies holding property to be transparent or pay an ongoing penalty (similar to the approach to offshore bank accounts).

This of course, doesn't guarantee stamp duty payment. What it does however, is collect some taxes which wouldn't otherwise be received.

FTBFun

chewmylegoff wrote: »

FTB - how do you think hmrc will be able to police the sale of shares in an overseas company which owns a uk property? I suppose they could say that uk tax was payable on the transaction, but it would be impossible to enforce as hmrc would have no means of detecting the transaction.

It depends where it is based - HMRC do have information sharing agreements with a fair few other countries which could lead to them passing information to HMRC.

What they could do is make SDLT payable on the gift of the property in the first place to the company - but that would switch the tax around to the vendor rather than the buyer. Tricky one.

FTBFun

chucknorris wrote: »

Why on earth is language like 'talking out of your backside' necessary?

I don't know if he is right or wrong, but assuming he was wrong, have you never made a mistake?

Apologies but it was a Monday morning, I was awaiting the coffee pot to fill up and a post about the BBC being Marxist and that there's nothing we could do annoyed me!