Nominees and the trustees of bare trusts are generally ‘looked through’ when establishing the real transacting parties for SDLT purposes. However, anti-avoidance rules mean that on the grant of a lease, nominees and bare trustees are (counterintuitively) treated as the lessor or lessee; while the beneficial lessee and lessor are ignored. As a result, a variety of straightforward commercial lease transactions, including sale and leasebacks and surrender and re-grants, can fail to qualify for the usual SDLT reliefs, merely because the lessor or lessee is acting through a nominee.
