Losing a professional or sales team can be a severe blow to a business and it is not uncommon for firms to ‘poach’ such teams. To minimise the risk of such a loss, there are steps that a firm can…

The Supreme Court has ruled that a director of a company that was itself the corporate director of a second company was not a de facto director of the second company. He was not therefore liable for the misuse of…

  The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has recently taken the first enforcement action of its kind against a blogging network which did not make it clear that companies were paying it to write promotional content about them. The content…

  The Government has announced that from April 2011 the maximum pension contribution which will attract full tax relief is being restricted to £50,000 per year and the lifetime allowance (LA) will be reduced to £1.5 million from April 2012.…

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has published for consultation two guidance documents that aim to help businesses and company directors comply with competition law. The first document, How Your Business Can Achieve Compliance, has been developed for businesses and…

  The guidance confirms that VAT is only payable where the IFA provides advice, not where financial products are sold. Where an IFA’s client wants advice and buys a product, the IFA must determine which is the ‘predominant service’ and…

HM Revenue and Customs have now published a Technical Note confirming the terms that apply to the National Insurance (NI) ‘holiday’ for new businesses, introduced on 6 September 2010. For the NI holiday to apply, the new business has to…

Any contract consists of terms which are stated in the contract and terms which are implied into the contract by operation of law. The main implied terms of contracts are those imposed by statute, in particlular: The Supply of Goods…

Clauses limiting liability under contracts have always been contentious, so a recent decision is to be welcomed because it sets out clearly the limitations which apply to exclusion clauses. The case involved GB Gas Holdings (Centrica) and Accenture, which had…