UT/2024/000066 - [2025] UKUT 00065 (TCC)

This decision, on the papers, concerns the claimant’s interim application for disclosure of documents for the purposes of its judicial review claim which is listed to be heard at a substantive hearing window beginning on 12 May 2025. For the reasons explained below, I refuse the disclosure application.

The parties’ submissions, for which I am grateful, were contained in the claimants’ application of 2 January 2024, HMRC’s response of 17 January 2025 and the claimants’ reply of 24 January 2025.

The judicial review, in relation to which permission was granted by the Administrative Court and then transferred to the Upper Tribunal, is against the lawfulness of HMRC’s decision made by a letter of 22 June 2022 of HMRC’s officer, Samantha Fletcher. That decision refused the claimant’s requests for repayment under the Disguised Remuneration Repayment Scheme (“Repayment Scheme”).

The claimant’s judicial review will be heard together with the judicial review of claims of Fluid Systems Technologies (Scotland) Limited and London Fluid System Technologies Limited (“the Fluid claimants”) which also concern refusal decisions under the Repayment Scheme.

A more detailed summary of the background to the Repayment Scheme appears in R (Sensor Solutions Ltd) v HMRC [2024] EWHC 1119 (Admin) (at [4]) but in outline the repayments sought related to sums previously settled by agreement with HMRC to avoid the application of the Loan Charge legislation (Finance (No. 2) Act 2017).

The Repayment Scheme was established pursuant to s20 Finance Act 2020 (“FA 2020”). One of the relevant criteria for repayment concerned whether there had been “reasonable disclosure” (defined in s20(5(a)-(d) FA 2020 and in particular, under s20(5)(d), whether certain information had been provided:

“…as was sufficient for it to be apparent that a reasonable case could have made that the amount concerned was payable to the Commissioners”.