UT (Tax & Chancery) UT/2023/000103 - [2025] UKUT 00102 (TCC)

MLT’s case was that “the only conclusion available to the Tribunal was that the trustees had a reasonable belief” – in other words, that the FTT’s conclusion was not “within the range of reasonable conclusions”. The basis for that submission was set out in Mr Simpson’s skeleton as follows:

“The points on which the FTT relied for its conclusion that the Appellant’s belief that there were no unauthorised payments was not reasonable were that the Appellant had not done enough in relation to the earlier valuers to determine whether they had sufficient relevant expertise to be able to value intellectual property, and the Appellant had not done enough to scrutinise the valuations provided and apply commercial common sense to those valuations…

The reliance placed by the Appellant on third party professionals who all claimed sufficient expertise to be able to value, properly, intellectual property assets was not unreasonable.”

Mr Simpson added that “the criticisms made by the FTT of the Appellant in relation to reliance on valuations would place an excessive burden on scheme administrators”.

The issue is thus whether the FTT’s conclusions about how MLT acted in relation to Ballards, Criticall and Gannon were not “within the range of reasonable conclusions”. We consider each in turn.