[2025] UKUT 00142 (TCC)

Submissions, analysis and determination of the interpretation issue

Introductory

We have referred to this issue as the “interpretation issue”, but the real question is whether Canadian Solar used the correct TARIC Code when the Entries were shipped into the United Kingdom, then an EU Member State. As we have noted, the TARIC Code that was used was what we have referred to as the Solar Module Code (at [8(3)(a)] and [8(4)]).

HMRC could have limited their response to Canadian Solar to asserting that Canadian Solar had made a mistake, without advancing a positive case as to what the correct TARIC Code was. That would not have been an especially plausible case, even as regards the interpretation issue, but would have been quite damaging to HMRC’s case on the general equity issue not to assert that the correct position was in fact clear, and Canadian Solar’s mistake an obvious one.

HMRC, very capably represented by Ms Vicary, made no such mistake and asserted (both before the FTT and before us) (i) that the position was clear and (ii) was that the Alternative Solar Module Code (described at [8(5)(a)]) could and should have been used. Before the FTT, it was contended that Canadian Solar’s error in this regard was “a basic and obvious error”: Decision at [147].

For the present, we confine ourselves to the question of whether there was an error at all, for Canadian Solar’s primary position – before the FTT and before us – was that the Solar Module Code had been the correct code for Canadian Solar to use.

There are, as it seems to us, a number of possible TARIC Codes that could potentially have been used when the Entries were imported into the United Kingdom. We consider them in the following paragraphs.