On 4 March 2015 the Court of Appeal handed down judgment in R (Ingenious Media Holdings plc) v HMRC. Sir Robin Jacob delivered the judgment of the court. This was an appeal from Sales J’s judgment in this matter.
Ingenious Media Holdings plc (“Ingenious”) and its subsidiaries conducted, inter alia, a business of promoting investment schemes in the form of partnerships intended to allow participating taxpayers to take advantage of certain tax reliefs and exceptions associated with films. HMRC maintain that all or most of these film schemes are ineffective for tax purposes, a matter that is currently being litigated. This case concerned statements made by HMRC’s then Permanent Secretary for Tax, Dave Hartnett, to two Times journalists in what Mr. Hartnett thought was an off-the-record briefing on tax avoidance schemes. The disclosure made to the journalists was that HMRC did not accept that the Appellants’ film schemes generated the tax reliefs claimed and that HMRC was going to challenge their validity. Mr. Hartnett acknowledged that he was aware of Patrick McKenna, the founder of Ingenious. Mr. Hartnett said that he thought that HMRC would be ultimately successful in defeating film schemes. This was information of HMRC’s own creation, not information given to it by taxpayers or by the Appellants in this case. Following the disclosure, various comments made by Mr. Hartnett were published in The Times, albeit attributed only to a “senior Revenue official”, in apparent breach of Mr. Hartnett’s understanding that they would not be published at all.
In brief, the Court of Appeal has held that:
R (Ingenious Media Holdings plc) v HMRC [2015] EWCA Civ 173, 4 March 2015