“I was not asked to provide bank statements for the purposes of this litigation…I was not asked anything about bank statements or to go and find them or anything like that.”
“I contacted my colleagues in the treasury department to see if they had anything in their archives. They carried out a search of their archives and they did not produce anything additional. I then asked them to contact the bank to see if they could obtain any further bank statements, but we were unable to obtain anything and my colleagues in treasury said that it is quite difficult to obtain old bank statements from our bank. So the ones presented as evidence are the only ones that we were able to locate.”
“Mr Parry: We have an electronic banking system with our bank and for large sums of money, it would have been transferred by a sort of online banking transfer, for which I would have been a signatory or an approver to that banking transaction and typically for large transactions, it would not have been by a cheque or anything like that. Mr Ewart: And by large, would you include an£830,000 payment? Would that count as large? Would£830,000 be large? Mr Parry: it would be large, yes.”
“there is a real distinction between a loan to A to enable him to pay his creditors and a payment to A’s creditors made for the purpose of discharging his debts.”
“The question is still whether the conditions of the composite phrase are fulfilled - were the sums paid to the settlor by way of loan? I do not doubt that in certain contexts money paid at A's request to B may be properly described as ‘paid to A’… But this is not the way in which a taxing statute is to be read. I am not, in the construction of such a statute, entitled to say that, because the legal or business result is the same whether on the one hand I borrow money from the company and with it make certain payments, or on the other hand the company at my request makes certain payments on my implied promise to repay, therefore it is immaterial what words are in the statute if that result is attained.”
“71. It emerges clearly, therefore, that the mere economic equivalence of a transaction to a loan does not show that it is a loan. The authorities show, equally--as Chitty comments--that the concept of 'loan' or 'lending' may vary from statute to statute if a particular meaning is adopted. In the case of Ch II of Pt IV of the 1996 Act, the concept of a 'loan relationship' is certainly unique to this statute but it does not appear that the underlying notion of the lending of money is to be seen in any way differently from that in which it would be seen generally. The contrary is the case; by specifically referring to the concept of 'a transaction for the lending of money', s 81(1)(b) evidently intends to confine a concept whose extent may otherwise be uncertain within well-known and ascertainable bounds… 73. In our judgment, it is impossible to conclude that any of the parties to these transactions thought that they were lenders or borrowers, or that they intended that to be the case.”
“I must be satisfied that according to the fair meaning of the words these sums were paid by way of loan to the settlor directly or indirectly by the company.”
“My answer is that according to the ordinary fair meaning of the words the company did not pay any sums to the settlor by way of loan. It would in fact be as inapt to say that the company paid him sums by way of loan when he was in debit on the account as to say that he paid the company sums by way of loan when he was in credit. Some stress was laid on the distinction in the old forms of pleading between the plea for money lent to the defendant and the plea of money paid at the request of the defendant to a third party. I am not inclined to give much weight to this consideration but it does indicate that there is at least a formal difference between the two transactions.”
“if the parties have themselves said ‘I am a borrower’ and ‘I am a lender’…the court will be at least very very reluctant to go behind it and say, “No you were not.”