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

Formwise appealed to the FTT on the basis that it had not received an unauthorised payment, because the £145,000 received from its SSAS in exchange for the IP transferred did not exceed “the amount which might be expected to be paid to a person who was at arm’s length”, and was thus not an unauthorised payment, but a “scheme administration employer payment” under s 180.

Langford and Fraser appealed on the basis that there was no unauthorised payment because the IP provided to the respective SSAS as security for their loans was of “adequate value” and so satisfied s 179(1)(b).

Before the FTT hearing, the parties had agreed to a number of points relating to IP valuation [19]-[20], including the following:

The FTT construed the contractual documents and found that the IP transferred in each case was a domain name as a stand-alone asset, and it was thus of nil value. It went on to find that unauthorised payments had therefore been made by each SSAS to the related Employer.

Ground 1 was that:

“The Tribunal erred in concluding that references in the operative documents to domain names were references only to the relevant domain names and did not include the websites of which those domain names were the addresses.”