Tax dodge of the week: Buy unquoted shares for your Sipp

A surprise U-turn by Gordon Brown means you will not be able to stuff your self-invested personal pension (Sipp) with residential property or fine wine. But the chancellor has not been a total party-pooper.

Emily Hohler
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published
in Features

A surprise U-turn by Gordon Brown means you will not be able to stuff your self-invested personal pension (Sipp) with residential property or fine wine. But the chancellor has not been a total party-pooper.

You can still hold unquoted shares in a Sipp from 6 April, says Josephine Combo in the Financial Times. At the moment, you can only hold unquoted shares in a pension if you have an employer-sponsored, small self-administered scheme (SSAS) and the number of shares is strictly limited.

However, all this will change in a few months, when private companies will get tax breaks of up to 40% to buy capital in their own firm. So, if you need to inject some capital into the business, you could issue some shares for the Sipp to buy.

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Of course, it's not a good idea to pour 100% of your Sipp into risky, unlisted shares. You might also have some trouble finding a genial Sipp provider, because of problems with accurate valuations. But at least the chancellor hasn't noticed yet.

Emily Hohler
Emily Hohler
Politics editor

Emily has worked as a journalist for more than thirty years and was formerly Assistant Editor of MoneyWeek, which she helped launch in 2000. Prior to this, she was Deputy Features Editor of The Times and a Commissioning Editor for The Independent on Sunday and The Daily Telegraph. She has written for most of the national newspapers including The Times, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Evening Standard and The Daily Mail, She interviewed celebrities weekly for The Sunday Telegraph and wrote a regular column for The Evening Standard. As Political Editor of MoneyWeek, Emily has covered subjects from Brexit to the Gaza war.

Aside from her writing, Emily trained as Nutritional Therapist following her son's diagnosis with Type 1 diabetes in 2011 and now works as a practitioner for Nature Doc, offering one-to-one consultations and running workshops in Oxfordshire.

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