Alan Pink looks at ways of avoiding or mitigating the tax consequences.
Life can be very messy at times. Consider the all too frequent picture of the couple who have been successful in business, and built up considerable joint undertaking and consequent wealth: everything is going swimmingly, until they realise that they can’t coexist any longer. This isn’t an article about matrimonial law: but anyone who has dealt professionally with marriage breakdown over more than a few cases realises that, in general terms, the court will adopt a “no fault” basic approach and look to split the joint wealth 50:50 in the absence of unusual circumstances. This would be very often a reasonably straightforward thing to sort out, but the fly in the ointment is tax: specifically, capital gains tax (CGT).
The basic rule is to be found in Section 58
