Payments by companies into trust in respect of employees were emoluments or earnings of those employees and were subject to income tax and National Insurance contributions, notwithstanding that the payments had been directed to a third party in circumstances where the employees had no prior entitlement to receive them.
The respondent (a member of the Murray Group) was one of several companies that entered into a series of transactions (in the tax years 2001/02 to 2008/09) pursuant to a scheme designed to avoid income tax and National Insurance contributions (NICs) in respect of their employees.
Payments were made by an employing company of contributions to an employees’ remuneration trust (the ‘Principal Trust’), which at its discretion set up sub-trusts in the names of individual employees of companies in the same group for the benefit of their families. In almost all of those cases, loans for an extended
