The new pre-pack regulations are designed to regulate connected person pre-pack sales with the aim of balancing the rights of creditors affected by business failure with the need to promote viable business rescue options to businesses, especially in the current economic climate.

Charlotte and Oliver Johnson’s progress from Glebe Farm, a Warwickshire smallholding, to running a Nottinghamshire farm is an inspiration for would-be farmers looking for their break into farming.

Following a BBC Panorama Freedom of Information request, the programme established that, of 111 ‘invited review’ reports prepared by Royal Colleges in response to hospital requests to review aspects of patient care, only 26 have been disclosed to regulators (including the CQC) and, of those, only 16 have been published in full.

Some of us are old enough to remember that the JCT With Contractor’s Design contract 1981 introduced design and build so as to place “single point responsibility” on the contractor. So, it was the contractor’s job to ratify the Employer’s Requirements in order to complete the design.

A recent Supreme Court ruling (R (Haworth) v HMRC) has highlighted the difficult line trodden by taxpayers who decide to challenge HMRC’s opinion that they are not entitled to the tax advantage conferred by entering into a particular tax arrangement.

When someone dies and leaves a will it is for the executor named within the will to apply for a grant of probate to allow them to administer the estate.

One of the grounds for challenging a will is that the deceased did not have the requisite mental capacity when the will was made. Ultimately the focus of the court is to ensure that the will genuinely represents the deceased’s wishes.

A recent ruling by the Upper Tribunal in Dunsby v HMRC [2021] has confirmed that efforts to avoid paying income tax by deploying an elaborate tax avoidance scheme can be thwarted by taking ‘a realistic view of the facts’ or, in other words, applying some common sense.

After the First Tier Tribunal found in favour of the beneficiary of a Remuneration Trust (Marlborough v HMRC) in September 2021, a differently constituted First Tier Tribunal, when considering an almost identical scheme used by Strategic Branding, has found in favour of HMRC, having determined not to adopt the reasoning applied in Marlborough.

Deciding whether to contest a trust is a big decision. It is important to make sufficient investigations at the outset to ascertain the realistic prospect of your claim succeeding.