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This signpost pulls together all of our articles and resources on trusts. Please feel free to browse the content. If you have any queries or suggestions, then the team would be delighted to hear from you.
Getting your head around this question has sent many a person, including accountants and even tax advisers, to the brink of insanity!
Trusts are a method of separating the legal and beneficial ownership of an asset or assets. In other words, one person’s name may be on the tin (ie at the land registry) but the real economic owner is some other person (known as the beneficiary).
This unfamiliar beast is supported by a perhaps baffling array of terminology (we’ve already used ‘beneficiary’) and tax regimes.
Things get trickier when the trustees of the trust are resident overseas. Here, we encounter a phalanx of anti-avoidance rules.
Thankfully, our articles in this signpost are very much focused on UK based trusts.
For more information on ‘what is a trust?’ then please see our dedicated article.
A trust – depending on the type of trust – will also suffer taxes on creation, throughout its lifetime and potentially on winding up.
The relevant taxes are usually:
Other taxes might also be relevant – for instance, if a trustee purchases a property, it might be subject to Stamp Duty Land Tax (“SDLT”).
We have created a number of different articles on the topic of trusts:
If you have any queries about this article, or trust or tax matters in general, then please do not hesitate to get in touch.