[2025] UKUT 00185 (TCC)

What is meant by “knowingly concerned” is, as Snowden LJ said, a matter of statutory interpretation. In Roberts v Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions, Ex p Spath Holme Ltd [2001] AC 349, Lord Nichols said at p 396:

“Statutory interpretation is an exercise which requires the court to identify the meaning borne by the words in question in the particular context. The task of the court is often said to be to ascertain the intention of Parliament expressed in the language under consideration. This is correct and may be helpful, so long as it is remembered that the ‘intention of Parliament’ is an objective concept, not subjective. The phrase is a shorthand reference to the intention which the court reasonably imputes to Parliament in respect of the language used.”

He added that “an appropriate starting point is that language is to be taken to bear its ordinary meaning in the general context of the statute”. 

Here, the statutory phrase is “knowingly concerned”. There is nothing in the words themselves, or in their context, which justifies or requires them to be read as applying only where the person in question has committed some “personal wrongdoing”, such as fraud, recklessness or acting without integrity.