Putney Power Limited & Ors v The Commissioners for HMRC
Decision date: 10 March 2023
Neutral citation: [2023] UKFTT 292 (TC)
Overall AI summary confidence: high
Short overview
This short overview is intended to summarise the case, issues and outcome so far as they are supported by the judgment.
AI confidence in this short overview: high
This case concerns case-management applications in five linked appeals about whether companies issuing EIS shares had begun the qualifying trade within two years of issue. The appellants sought a Rule 18 lead-case direction identifying Putney as determinative of common issues; the Tribunal refused, finding the factual matrices were not sufficiently clearly common, and instead granted HMRC’s Rule 5 proposal that only Putney and Piston proceed while the other three appeals are stayed. Procedural directions were given and permission to appeal was reserved.
Ratio decidendi
This summary is intended to identify the ratio decidendi, meaning the legal reasons for deciding and the binding part of the decision.
AI confidence in this ratio decidendi summary: high
A Rule 18 lead-case direction should be made only where the common or related issues of fact or law can be defined with sufficient clarity and precision to be binding on related cases; significant factual divergences between appeals (for example differing stages of preparedness by the statutory deadline) can make a Rule 18 direction inappropriate and justify use of Rule 5 to manage which appeals proceed.
Obiter dicta
This summary is intended to identify obiter dicta, meaning observations made by the way that were not necessary to deciding the case and are not binding.
AI confidence in this obiter dicta summary: medium
The Tribunal indicated that a decision in an advanced case may be persuasive for other appeals but need not be determinative where it rests on issues (such as liquidated-damages claims or site-handover timings) that do not arise or have different relevance in related cases; and that nuanced factual differences are not automatically fatal to a lead-case direction but require demonstrable practical commonality and clarity of the common issues.