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

Mr Simpson said that the FTT “appeared to reject as irrelevant” the fact that Mr Kelly was a chartered accountant who “held himself out as having the competence necessary to give the valuation in question”. This is, however, nothing more than a disagreement as to the weight to be placed on Mr Kelly’s accountancy qualifications (when compared to his lack of any experience in valuing IP assets) and cannot provide a basis for setting aside this part of the FTT Decision on the basis that it was “not within the range of reasonable conclusions” open to that Tribunal.

Mr Simpson also submitted that “given the inherent uncertainty in the valuation of intellectual property, it cannot be reasonable to require more than that the valuations were checked for accuracy of figures and correspondence with information provided, and included no obvious errors”. This is a challenge to elements of the FTT’s starting point, namely that the reasonable pension fund trustee in the position of MLT would have “applied a critical commercial and business view to the information provided to it from its professional valuers”; and given “detailed scrutiny to the documents (and other related transactions) which formed the basis of the funding transaction”. We reject Mr Simpson’s submission, and instead endorse and accept all four of the identified factors set out at [203] of the FTT Decision and repeated at §‎229 above. The FTT was plainly correct to find that the reasonable corporate trustee with responsibility for administering pension funds would not blindly accept valuations without applying any “commercial common sense”. As the FTT repeatedly said (see [194], [199] and [203]), this did not require MLT to carry out a technical review of the basis of the valuation.

We also disagree with Mr Simpson’s wider submission that the FTT’s approach places “an excessive burden on scheme administrators”. As the FTT said, the reasonable administrator would appoint valuers qualified in the relevant field and would also carry out a commercial and common sense check of the valuations received. In Ballards case, MLT did neither.