Tax on stage

We act for a playwright and need to value his literary estate – his copyrights – which produce regular and substantial royalty income. This is for capital gains tax purposes.

To explain our client has a ‘slave’ contract with his own company which owns the copyrights. On termination of the contract the copyright reverts to our client personally.

Death of course will terminate the contract. So there will then be a corporation tax chargeable gain and no business property relief for inheritance tax purposes to boot.

So we intend to vary the agreement which will amount to a disposal of our client’s right to acquire on death. Hence the need to get a valuation which will need discounting back to present-day value.

We have thought of getting a specialist valuer but no one either in the artistic or financial fields that we have asked...