Traditional Equipment Leasing

Rarely can a new legislative code have been quite so familiar at the time of its enactment as the regime for 'long funding leases' introduced by this year's Finance Act. It was in a consultation paper on corporation tax reform published back in 2003 that the Government first suggested that ownership (for capital allowance purposes) of plant or machinery leased under a finance lease — or an operating lease that was essentially a financing transaction — might be moved from the lessor to the lessee. The decision to proceed with this reform was announced in December 2004 at which time framework draft clauses were published; and these formed the basis of the...