Certainly NOT a tax haven!

I entirely agree

Richard

This view, while counter-intuitive, is correct. Many people in the 1920s believed that only by accumulating savings to finance investment could the economy grow. Thatcher’s ‘handbag economics’ revived this misconception, totally ignoring the ‘paradox of thrift’. What Britain needs now is not more savings, but more investment—and the latter can only come from the public sector. The resulting growth would help restore confidence and ‘crowd in’ private investment. But financial market opinion is set by people whose economics is largely derived from Thatcher’s bankers, and so the City’s insistence on balancing the fiscal books is deeply counter-productive.

Still, it’s not the City types that suffer—it’s ordinary people with low incomes, poor job security and a miserly pension.

George (in didactic mode)

If you are saying, as you now appear to be, that a judge can read legislation in its entirety and interpret it in a way that is consistent with existing legal precedent, I do not disagree.

If you think that is the “spirit of the law” then fine. I had just assumed that when at the top of this thread it said:

“The code stipulates that banks be expected to follow the ’spirit of the law’ as defined by HM Revenue and Customs rather than legal precedent.”

You were somehow suggesting that the spirit of the law was something that could be determined by HMRC without reference to precedent: or, in legal terms, I was giving words their ordinary interpretation.

If, as you are now saying, “the spirit of the law” will not be defined by HMRC then it seems we are talking about tax matters being decided incrementally by judges through judicial interpretation of statutes and on the basis of legal precedent. Which is what we currently do. In which case why do you object tot he comment that you quote above?

And nor is HMRC

But it does prove there is a spirit of the law

Which is what HMRC is saying

And you deny - wholly without foundation

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/07/01/the-crazy-story-of-hernan-arbizu/

It’s a story of tax evasion, criminality, gangsters and quite incredible incompetence currently playing out in the Argentine courts… really quite incredible.

It appears that you have misunderstood the jurisprudence.

In that case, the point was that they were trying to find a way of interpreting the law so that it accorded with ECJ caselaw. In other words, there were two pieces of slightly conflicting legal material here and the court was seeking to resolve the conflict while causing the least damage to the legislation.

They were saying that legal precedent and legislation is all that matters, and the question was how to resolve any friction. Your argument is that precedent and legislation are irrelevant, what matters is what HMRC believe the spirit of legislation to be.

Or, as quoted above,

“The code stipulates that banks be expected to follow the ’spirit of the law’ as defined by HM Revenue and Customs rather than legal precedent.”

There is nothing in the case you referenced that suggested that legal precedent was secondary to HMRC definitions.