How are debts owed to family members dealt with in divorce proceedings?
The first question for the court to determine is whether the debts are legitimate, and this is a...
Most of the post-Budget headlines have focused on the energy companies' reactions to the windfall tax on profits from oil and gas production, designed to subsidise the cut in fuel duty. The weekend's papers seem to suggest the likelihood of tax reliefs being made available to gas companies in order to address fears of reduced investment and consequent job losses - all of which increasingly gives the impression of an ill-conceived policy, and has tended to detract attention from a host of positive measures for businesses and investors, including:-
- a reduction in the main rate of corporation tax from 28 to 26 per cent per annum with a further 1 per cent reduction in each of the three following years;
- increasing to £10 million the lifetime limit on capital gains qualifying for entrepreneurs relief;
- various changes to increase the availability of EIS relief, and raising the rate of EIS income tax relief to 30 per cent;
- an increase in the rate of R&D tax relief for SMEs;
- the creation of 21 enterprise zones across the UK, to benefit from discounts on business rates, and faster planning decisions. One of these is to be situated in the Black Country. In the immediate aftermath of the Budget speech, some observers appeared to have interpreted this as a declaration that the entire Black Country was to be an enterprise zone - on the contrary, the location of the new zone has yet to be announced and could theoretically by anything from the whole of the Black Country to the few miles between Cradley and Lye.
If the reaction to the Budget at the Black Country Chamber presentation which I attended was somewhat muted, this is hardly surprising, against a backdrop of rising inflation, public sector cuts, and continuing difficulties in obtaining bank finance.
From a legal perspective, some of the pledges were hard to fathom. For example, the "moratorium" exempting firms with less than 10 employees from red tape only applies to new and domestic regulations. Given the breadth of European regulatory burdens, one suspects that this is hardly going to make a radical difference - it is also difficult to see how such a sweeping commitment (even when restricted to new, domestic measures) will be implemented in practice. In keeping with last week's warmer temperatures, there was a fair amount of hot air in the Budget speech.